July 06, 2008
Cabaret
If you've never particularly cared for movie musicals, thought the genre silly with characters bursting into song in public, strangers joining in, somehow knowing the lyrics and the dance steps, then I've got a suggestion for your viewing pleasure: Cabaret.
Adapted from the hit Broadway musical, the film version stars Liza Minnelli as an American singer performing at a Berlin cabaret in the waning years of the Weimar Republic. Minnelli begins an affair with Michael York, a bookish expatriate Englishman, their relationship taking place against an increasingly turbulent backdrop, as Germany seemingly spirals out of control, Nazis and Socialists brawling in the streets.
One of the major changes from the stage version is the elimination of songs used to advance the plot, that spontaneous bust-out-in-song style I mentioned before. In the film, director Bob Fosse confines most of the performances to the stage in the Kit Kat Club, his camera moving amongst the patrons, their shadowy silhouettes drinking and smoking, laughing and applauding, making the viewers feel a part of the audience -- which they are, in a meta sort of way.
The movies opens -- and closes -- with Joel Grey, the oily Master of Ceremonies, leering at the audience before bursting into song, greeting us at the beginning with Willkommen, the number that introduces us to the Kit Kat Club, as well as Michael York's character. Grey is a deeply unsettling presence throughout the film; perverse, entertaining and vaguely menacing, he also bears an uncanny resemblance at times to Joseph Goebbels.
Minelli and Grey provide some comic relief in Money, a catchy nightclub number that showcases their talents. It's just fun, adding to the sense that an evening at the Kit Kat Club really is a refuge from the troubles that lurk outside.
There's only one musical number that takes place off stage; it does involve people joining in and knowing the words to the song, but the scene is entirely logical -- and thoroughly chilling. The beauty of the singer's tenor, the increasing fervor of the delivery, and the enthusiasm of the crowd leave the viewer discomfited hours later by the realization that the tune is buzzing through your brain.
It's one of the few scenes in any movie that gives me goosebumps, no matter how many times I've viewed it.
You'll get what I'm saying after you watch it.
The film ends with Minnelli saying goodbye to her lover at the train station, unwilling to leave the goodtimes in Berlin to join him in England. She returns to the club, takes the stage and delivers a blockbuster performance, Life is a Cabaret. The Master of Ceremonies returns to close things out, delivering a corrupted reprise of his film-opening greeting, before leaving the stage in perhaps the most audacious ending to any movie musical.
"Cabaret" is not your typical feel-good musical, hinting as it does -- and must -- with the horrors that we all know were about to be unleashed upon Europe. I remember leaving the theater after seeing a stage performance in my teens, shaken, thinking that there could be no greater calling than hunting down the surviving members of the Third Reich. It's not every day a musical can evoke that kind of response.
Don't let me scare you off; this isn't Schindler! The Musical!; it's a smart movie that features terrific writing, great songs, and top-notch performances, all in the service of a very adult story.
If you only know Liza Minnelli as the troubled daughter of Judy Garland, her divorces a staple of tabloid journalism, rest assured this film will be a revelation.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 6, 2008 12:56 PM
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