The screen version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights offers a thin story but plenty of good cheer.
The screen version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights offers a thin story but plenty of good cheer.
W arner Bros. is so proud of In the Heights, the movie version of the musical Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote before Hamilton, and which landed on Broadway when its author was just 28, that the studio has been showing it to critics for more than a year. Warner’s pride is well-warranted; the movie is bouncy, effervescent, and full of spirit. The actors are adorable, the choreography is inventive, and the songs, though not great, offer lots of infectious Latin/hip-hop beats.
Having much to recommend it, In the Heights has nevertheless graduated to the overhyped category and falls short of being one of the great movie musicals. You might call it West Side Story without the stabbing; but another way to put that is that it’s West Side Story without a dramatic point. Given that Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story is on its way, it’s unclear whether In the Heights will even be the best Latino musical of 2021; certainly its songs don’t hold a candle to the Leonard Bernstein–Stephen Sondheim powerhouses.
The screenplay, by Quiara Alegría Hudes, based on the book she wrote for the stage musical, is thin. What we get is essentially a series of character portraits, bouncing happily from one likable but bland working-class striver to another, like a two-and-a-half-hour version of Sesame Street’s “People in Your Neighborhood” number. The critics are rolling out the word “vibrant,” their favorite cliché for anything that features minorities being entertainingly colorful. Sure, but it’s not too much to expect a musical to give us a compelling story as well. Not only does In the Heights lack the world-historical characters and drama of Hamilton, it has no forward thrust at all.
Still, if the movie is half as good as Hamilton, it’s still five times better than Rent. The bilingual musical celebrates Washington Heights, or rather a sanitized and idyllic version of same, a poor Latino neighborhood north of Harlem on the Manhattan side of the George Washington Bridge that is home to many Dominicans and Puerto Ricans (such as Miranda himself, who grew up there). The Heights is framed as both a comfy wonderland for Latinos and a mere barrio from which people long to escape, either back to the Caribbean, to downtown Manhattan, or even to the Bronx. Why would anyone want to leave this salsa paradise, though? The movie offers no clue, but I know a guy who lived there until a few weeks ago — he moved to the East Village after one too many nights coming home to find heroin addicts shooting up under the stairs in his lobby.
Not that we need to hear too much about that in a musical. Instead, we cheer for the rise of Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) — as in U.S. Navy, the lettering on a ship his father spotted when they arrived in America. He’s a big-hearted dreamer who runs a bodega and yearns to get out, to the Dominican Republic where he has a chance to buy a bar on the cheap after it was wrecked by a hurricane. He pines for Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), a big-hearted dreamer who works as a beautician and yearns to get out, downtown to study at fashion school. Meanwhile, big-hearted dreamer Benny (Corey Hawkins) pines for Nina (Leslie Grace), a big-hearted dreamer who is so disillusioned by the racial slights she experienced at Stanford that she is trying to drop out. She’s having a hard time doing so because her big-hearted dad (Jimmy Smits), who runs a car service, is willing to sacrifice his business to push her up the social ladder. The neighborhood’s honorary abuela, Claudia (Olga Merediz), a Cuban immigrant who came over in the 1940s, lost some of her spirit but not her big heart in a lifetime spent as a cleaning lady. As for her dreams, she has a plan to pass those along to the next generation. In case you miss the dreaminess, there’s also a big rally on behalf of “DREAMers,” as in young illegal immigrants.
All of this is just an excuse for the elaborate and ebullient musical numbers staged by director Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) and choreographer Christopher Scott. The title song is a cheerful intro to the neighborhood, and there’s a knockout sequence in a beauty parlor where ladies execute a tap dance with their long fingernails and mannequin heads decorated with wigs swivel along to the action. News that the bodega man has sold a winning lottery ticket worth $96,000 yields a terrific mass splashdance number at the neighborhood’s gigantic Highbridge Pool, which has a capacity of nearly 5,000 bathers.
Despite the street grit, everything in the movie floats along on show-tune fantasy; it’s the kind of piece in which a bodega manager quotes Cole Porter while mentioning that he sells cold porters. Miranda himself pops up on occasion, as a guy who sells piraguas (shaved-ice desserts) and sings a bit too literally that he is “barely scraping by.” Late in the movie there’s a sweet scene in which a couple dances on the side of an apartment building in an inner-city rethink of Royal Wedding.
Most of the movie is thoroughly enchanting, and though at 143 minutes it runs self-indulgently long, it’s pretty hot outside and the multiplex is always a great place to cool down. Also, seeing it with a crowd (as I did not manage to do, having been unable to make it to a theatrical screening), is bound to be more exciting than watching it at home on HBO Max. If musicals are your thing, In the Heights is an excellent reason to get out of the house. And if they’re not your thing, there’s always F9 later in the month.
