Travolta's One Good Movie of the Decade Is Here!

John Travolta could not have hoped for a better coming out party.

Not to be glib or anything, but whether gay or straight, the only thing that Travolta truly brings to the new remake of Hairspray is precisely that question, or a similar one -- is he or isn’t he…crazy?

Despite all of the unfounded hoopla surrounding Travolta’s performance (his Baltimore accent rings false to anyone who watches The Wire), he certainly doesn’t manage to screw up what turns out to be a pretty great movie musical, even if he is overshadowed by virtually everyone else in the movie. (Especially Michelle Pfeiffer.)

The film revolves around the idea that a talented fat girl deserves a better lot than a pretty girl who can’t dance. The notion is at once familiar and not entirely convincing since both weight/attractiveness and dancing skill are innate traits that are only marginally within our control. Certainly in this film, it is never implied that Tracy Turnblad learned her dance moves. Rather it is obvious, as one of Aki Kaurismaki’s characters might say, that rock and roll is in her blood.

It is on this level that the film succeeds tremendously – in depicting the first generation whose bloodstream was filled with ROCK and ROLL chromosomes. That moment when kids were being fed hilariously mixed messages – their parents telling them to do their homework and turn off the TV, the TV telling them to drop out of school and rebel against their parents – the dialectic of which, of course, allowed the media industry to thrive without completely killing off its work force, and without seriously calling into question the system as a whole. This situation is parodied knowingly in Hairspray, especially in James Marsden’s songs for The Corny Collins Show, in which kids are all but told to shoot up heroin in the bathroom stalls of their schools. Surely, a line left out from the song that John Waters might have written.

And it is also here that the film resonates on an emotional level, in its ability to make you identify with Tracy. After all, whether or not Tracy deserves better is irrelevant. We all know what it feels like to think we deserve better, especially when we see the one we love “walking hand and hand/with another man/in my place.” Tracy’s girth may provide the external signifier we need to get behind her, but it’s her bummer of a dilemma that makes us empathize, and it’s the film’s alignment with rock ‘N’ roll that totally sells it.

Well, rock ‘N’ roll…but also the movie musical. The real movie musical. Not the one that insists on concocting a conceit to explain why people are breaking into song and dance, like Chicago (it’s all in their minds!) and Dreamgirls (they’re recording artists!) and Moulin Rouge (it’s postmodern!). (Imagine if action movies felt they had to explain their non-realist moments in such a way.) Not the one that insists on doing a time lapse montage (read: music video) during each musical number (again, Dreamgirls). Hairspray revives the formula that used to work best: it uses the singing and dancing to tell a story and express the characters’ emotions that would otherwise not surface.

Speaking of which, there is a scene between John Travolta and Christopher Walken in this movie that is inexpressibly magnificent, certainly as much so as any of Charlie Kaufman’s forays into surreal celebrity-play. All I can say is that I cannot believe that it happened. And that I was allowed to see it. And that its venue, which could easily have been You Tube for how absolutely absurd it is, is the big screen where its absurdity, like everything else on the big screen, is made much greater.

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