Posted: 07/25/2007

Hairspray

(2007)

by Sawyer J. Lahr

There is a sweet naïveté about a teenager like Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonksy), who greets the rat infested streets of her city singing, “Good morning, Baltimore,” but other than the rodents and the town flasher (cameo by John Waters), nothing is as seedy or dingy about this film’s version of the setting. There remains little of the sardonic. exaggerative working-class surrealism of the original Hairspray’s aesthetic, though this recent production should be distinguished from its predecessor. It is adapted from a Tony Award-winning Broadway musical and the original script by John Waters. It is not a Waters production, but one aspect is evidently true to the 1988 film: the 35mm film format.

By now, the grit has watered down, but the basic tenets of radical racial integration of 1962, being different, and not fitting in, has been taken to a new level by director Adam Shankman. The story’s fundamental message now reaches wider, mainstream audiences who may not be able to tolerate just anyone in drag (a la Divine). Travolta, clad in a fat suit, manages not to shake many tail feathers as Edna Turnblad other than her own, considering the film’s gross at the box office and despite the dissent of the Christian Focus on the Family website, Plugged In Online.

Tracy challenges the racist producers of the towns local television program, The Corny Collins Show, fronted by Michelle Pfeiffer. The progressive and innocent pod becomes locally infamous, upturning the racist sentiments of her neighbors by jiving with black folk from the ghetto, subverting the towns’ local politics, and managing to enamor the boy crush and star of the Collins show, Link Larken (Zac Effron).

Whatever possessed the MPAA to pass Waters’ Hairspray off as PG was a miracle. It must have been much easier stamp the same rating on the borderline raunchy dialogue and mild to strong sexual indiscretions in this movie-musical adaptation, content which is still much tamer than the outlandish content that earned Waters the title “Sultan of Sleaze.”

If it is surprising that the original was rated PG, it is not at all uncanny that the story was cleaned up for mainstream audiences drawn by the star-studded and otherwise young and upcoming cast (i.e., Christopher Walken, Queen Latifah, and additional cameos by Ricki Lake and Jerry Stiller). If none of that is the case, maybe people are going just because the story is a little bit different than your average coming-of-age teen movie.

Sawyer J. Lahr is a film critic and writer living in Chicago.

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