It’s been nearly 20 years since cult filmmaker John Waters cleaned up his act long enough to make Hairspray, the tale of pleasantly plump ’60s teen Tracy Turnblad, who fights to get on a local TV dance show and subsequently fights to desegregate the program. Since then, the beloved cult classic has inspired a hit Broadway musical, which has now inspired another silver-screen treatment, which has inspired John Travolta to dress in heavy latex drag.
Joining Travolta, but sans buxom fat-suits, is an all-star cast including Michelle Pfeiffer, Queen Latifah and Christopher Walken. But it’s the younger stars that really shine, especially newcomer Blonsky, who makes Tracy as upbeat, energetic and irrepressible as ever. It’s easy to root for her as she sings and dances her way through the Baltimore civil rights movement. As in the original film, the issue of racism is made as lightweight as possible. It seems to annoy the black characters more than anything else, but it also makes it a no-brainer to root for Tracy’s cause.
While you might expect a musical version of a movie to look a little more vibrant and flashy than its songless counterpart, the opposite is true of Hairspray. The Waters version had the vivid colors and surreal, plastic feel, whereas Shankman’s version, aside from the pastel palette of the Corny Collins Show, appears to be set in the real world. Here, it’s the sounds more than the sights that set the movie’s tone.
The songs are quick, catchy and frequent. But while they initially push the narrative forward at a satisfying speed, they eventually slow things down to give everyone some time in the spotlight. Travolta, Walken, Pfeiffer, et al. each get a run at strutting their stuff, and while every sequence has at least one good chuckle, the supporting-player subplot songs add up to bring the running time dangerously close to the two-hour mark, which is a little much for a feel-good musical with an emotional arc that essentially moves from happy to happier to happiest. At the same time, it would be tough to choose what fat to trim. A subplot involving Velma von Tussle’s (Pfeiffer) attempt to seduce Tracy’s father (Walken) could easily go, but then we’d lose the joke about the whoopee-cushion bed and the hilarious scene where Tracy’s dad serenades his way back into Tracy’s mother’s heart. So in the end it’s probably best to leave the film much like its star: pleasantly plump.