Mark Reviews Movies: HAMILTON (2020)

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 2, 2020

A movie version of Hamilton was inevitable. A Broadway show doesn't become that kind of cultural phenomenon only to remain on stage for the rest of time. Anyone who has seen writer/lyricist/composer Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical on stage, either on Broadway or at one of its other stops (as this writer did, during the Chicago run), probably had mixed feelings on the prospect of a movie adaptation.

It could work. For sure, the story of the founding of the United States, as seen from the perspective of Alexander Hamilton and told through a diverse mixture of musical stylings, is straightforward and accessible enough that it could be done as a period piece. The result might seem odd, though, considering how many anachronisms—the music, some gags, the modernity of the dialogue—the show contains.

Miranda's point wasn't to present history exactly as it was, after all. It was to relate the past to the present—how the youth of an era define the future (and hopefully ensure that the next generation can improve matters or correct the mistakes), how the political discourse and campaigning within this country haven't changed all that much (They've only been amplified), how olden debates about the proper way to govern are the ones we're still having now. The musical doesn't so much modernize history as it seeks to show us how the matters of history still matter in the modern day.

The show's casting, intentionally placing actors of diverse race and ethnicity into roles of historical figures who weren't of those races and ethnicities, was particularly ingenious. The history of the United States, just as the country itself, doesn't belong to one kind of people. We are all in this together, and if we're quicker to realize that undeniable fact, there exists a chance we might obtain this country's promise, as flawed as the systems at its birth and throughout its history may have been—and continue to be. The widespread acceptance and success of the show is, perhaps, a sign that, for all of the continued failures in regards to the American promise, there's at least some progress happening.

There's another issue in adaptation, and that's the show's inherent theatricality. Movie adaptations of stage musicals typically scoff at such things. The thinking is that the theater is the theater, while film is meant to represent the world as closely to the way it is.

You can't do a movie of Miranda's musical without incorporating at least some of the stage show's theatrical elements. Ideally, an adaptation would be founded upon that way of thinking. That's the brilliance of Hamilton, the film version of the Broadway smash. The filmmakers have completely bypassed the issues of adaptation and just filmed the show, as it happened over three performances at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on Broadway in June of 2016, with the show's original cast on stage.

The result is splendid. Those who saw a performance (or multiple ones, as fans of the medium often do, because there really is no substitute for the thrill of witnessing live theater—especially great theater like this show) have a chance to re-live it or, likely, see it with the original cast for the first time. Those who haven't seen it get an opportunity to come as close to the experience of seeing the show live as possible.

Certain snobs may dismiss this as "not a real movie," because it's a filmed stage show, but that's wholly reductive thinking. There is real craft on display, in the way director Thomas Kail has orchestrated the filming with multiple cameras (both stationary and moving) and, since it's often the forgotten art of filmmaking, the way editor Jonah Moran has assembled three separate performances and shots clearly filmed without an audience (lest the camera get in the way of their enjoyment). If you can't get behind such basics, at least try to consider it a documentary re-capturing one of the most popular and significant cultural artifacts of recent memory.

Kail was the correct choice for this job. He directed the musical for its workshop, off-Broadway, and Broadway runs, so he undoubtedly is more intimately familiar with the workings of this production—from the blocking, to the choreography, to the performances, to the lighting, to the set design, to the pacing—than anyone else in the world (Miranda, perhaps, being a tie or close second).

As a director of this film, he knows where the cameras should and need to be for dynamic and complete coverage of the performance. There's a straight-on one, elevated just above the heads of the audience, but we also have angles from downstage, upstage, the sides, and overhead. Kail knows when to move the camera and, because the stage itself moves with a series of turntables, keep it still. It must be said that the film production actually elevates certain moments, particularly when Angelica Schuyler (Renée Elise Goldsberry, during a show-stopper of a song) rewinds Hamilton's courtship of her sister/his wife Eliza (Phillipa Soo) to show it from her perspective.

There are unexpected moments of close-ups, such as when Miranda, as Alexander Hamilton, introduces himself or at the height of certain songs. Those will be especially appreciated by anyone who saw a performance from the balcony, and either way, we get to see the particulars of performances that would have been missed by a theater audience. Take, for example, how Jonathan Groff's King George III—singing a series of peppy and poppy break-up songs, with lyrics like, "I will send a fully armed battalion to remind you of my love"—spits and drools during one impassioned moment of rage.

To summarize the plot is almost useless at this point, but with brevity, it's a biography of Hamilton, portrayed as an idealistic intellectual who comes to realize the inevitability of his death, rushes to do as much as he can with the time he has, and ends up hastening that moment by way of his pride and his inability to understand anyone or anything beyond the scope of his own thinking. The main thrust is his friend/foe relationship with Aaron Burr, played by Leslie Odom Jr., a pragmatic, Salieri-like politician who envies Hamilton and ultimately becomes "the damn fool that shot him."

The musical remains a singular accomplishment in the ways it presents history with such clarity and dynamism, it tells the intimate stories of its protagonist and his contemporaries, and it becomes about why we tell these stories, whom the focus of those stories is, and why it's important who is telling them. Hamilton, the film, gives us Hamilton, the stage show, as it was, is, and, in some way because of the film, always will be. Can great theater, simply presented as theater, make a great film? It does here, that's for sure.

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