Chicago

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Chicago introduces fame as something Roxie Hart can watch from the audience without knowing how to obtain it. Velma Kelly performs at the Onyx Club with the confidence Roxie wants, although the missing half of her double act already hints at trouble behind the spotlight. Velma is arrested after killing her husband and sister, while Roxie pursues a promise of access offered by Fred Casely. When he admits that the promised connection was a lie, she shoots him. Her husband Amos initially believes her claim that she acted against an intruder, but the identity of the dead man exposes the affair. Roxie’s pursuit of performance has brought her into a setting where another kind of audience will decide her future.

The women’s jail has its own hierarchy, controlled by Matron Mama Morton and maintained through exchanges of money and favours. Roxie recognises Velma and approaches her as a fan, only to discover that admiration does not make them allies. Other inmates explain their crimes through performances that transform resentment and violence into precise musical routines. The Cell Block Tango offers a chorus of women asserting their versions of events rather than an impartial account of innocence. Its staging lets each inhabit the centre of attention briefly, while the surrounding prison reminds us that the consequences exist outside the confidence of the number. The film repeatedly moves between those two kinds of reality.

Billy Flynn sells the possibility of an acquittal through the same logic used to sell a show. His public claim to care about love is presented with an image calculated to attract an audience, while the practical arrangement requires money. Amos supplies the resources for Roxie’s defence, although he receives little recognition for doing so. Flynn builds a sympathetic story around his client and teaches her how to perform it. During the press conference, reporters become an audience he can manage, and Roxie appears as a ventriloquist’s dummy whose words and gestures belong to the lawyer. Her first real taste of celebrity arrives when someone else determines exactly what she should say.

Publicity changes the balance between the two accused women. Roxie becomes the attraction, leaving Velma to consider a partnership she would previously have dismissed. Their rivalry depends less on the seriousness of their cases than on which story the press finds new. Another sensational arrest can pull attention away without resolving anything about either woman’s guilt. Roxie responds by claiming she is pregnant, converting her private life into another publicity device. Amos, who is supposedly central to that announcement, remains almost invisible. His musical number gives that neglect a form of its own: he can stand in front of everyone and still feel that they are looking straight through him.

Roxie begins to believe that public interest makes her powerful enough to dispense with Flynn. The execution of an inmate who has maintained her innocence breaks that confidence. For a moment, the film removes the reassuring distance created by its imagined stages and reminds her that the legal process can end in an actual death. Hiring the lawyer again is therefore more than another step in a successful publicity campaign. She is frightened of what will happen if the performance fails. The contrast also changes how the earlier prison numbers can be understood: style and defiance may command attention, but they do not give every woman the same resources or outcome.

The trial turns Flynn’s method into a full production. He controls emphasis, makes accusations against the prosecution and presents his client’s changing account as a reason to sympathise with her rather than distrust her. Musical staging converts legal manoeuvres into circus tricks and tap dancing, making the work of distraction explicit. An incriminating diary appears to threaten Roxie until Flynn redirects the suspicion toward the district attorney. The spectacle succeeds, and she is acquitted. Yet another shooting outside the courthouse immediately supplies the press with a fresher story. The public that helped make her famous moves on without owing her a lasting place in its attention.

Amos still hopes for the family future Roxie has described, but she reveals that the pregnancy was invented. Her freedom does not automatically produce the theatrical career she imagined, and neither woman can easily sustain a solo act once the novelty of the murder cases fades. Velma proposes a partnership based on the same notoriety they fought over. They do not have to like each other to recognise that the double act has commercial value. Their final performance turns rivalry into collaboration without offering a moral conversion. The audience applauds, leaving the women successful within a system whose appetite for sensation remains exactly what allowed their cases to become entertainment.

Rob Marshall’s film gives John Kander and Fred Ebb’s songs room to operate as part of Roxie’s theatrical imagination, frequently cutting between a harsh setting and its polished stage equivalent. Rob Marshall and screenwriter Bill Condon preserve the distance between the event and the fantasy, so a prison conversation or legal interview can be transformed without suggesting that everyone literally begins singing in the room. Renée Zellweger’s Roxie and Catherine Zeta-Jones’s Velma compete through different kinds of presence, while Richard Gere’s Flynn performs professionalism as another act. The glittering surfaces do not soften the story’s transactional world. They show how that world presents itself when it wants money, sympathy or applause.