“We had to assert our dignity in small ways.”
That’s Abuela Claudio (Olga Merediz), the neighborhood matriarch of In the Heights, talking about the immigrant experience in America. The movie, an adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pre-Hamilton stage musical, asserts dignity in BIG ways.
Directed by Jon M. Chu (Crazy Rich Asians) and featuring choreography by Christopher Scott, In the Heights is a musical of the more-is-more, Moulin Rouge variety. It opens with a blaring, blazing-fast tour of its predominantly Latino neighborhood that has you holding your breath until the title comes up (keys and hoses serve as instruments; at times the editing is literally on the musical beat). With each new song, dance move, and character that follows, the goal is the same: to bring dignity to the diverse array of people represented in this particular pocket of New York City.
Our guide in that opening is Usnavi de la Vega (Anthony Ramos, of the original Hamilton stage company), who has taken over a corner bodega from his late parents, but dreams of moving back to his native Dominican Republic. His story intertwines with that of Nina (Leslie Grace), the neighborhood’s academic all-star, who has returned from a difficult first year as a minority student at Stanford; and Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), a nail technician dreaming of a fashion career downtown. The cast also includes Jimmy Smits as Nina’s bootstraps-believing father and a thoroughly delightful Miranda himself as the disheveled Piragua Guy, a shaved-ice peddler. (Miranda’s brief number, in which he seems to briefly crack at the sight of his competitor, a soft-serve ice-cream truck, is one of the film’s highlights.)
As Usnavi, Ramos is almost too good. Despite an awkward framing device in which an older Usnavi narrates the story to a gathered group of kids, In the Heights is meant to be an ensemble piece—with Usnavi, Nina, and Vanessa as the three legs of the narrative stool. Grace and Barrera are more skilled and multifaceted as singers and dancers, yet Ramos knows how to look into the camera and make you believe that he’s your best friend. He’s charming with his costars, too; after bumbling his way into a date with Vanessa, Usnavi can’t stop giggling when she shows up looking stunning in a sleek green dress. He’s undone both by her beauty and the idea that she’s willing to be seen with a goofy guy like him. Ramos’ magnetism is the film’s greatest strength, which ironically undermines the communal objective. Through no real fault of their own, Nina and Vanessa’s stories lack the same narrative pull, no matter how many chances they’re given to sing.
That communal aspect can certainly be felt in the larger production numbers, which feature so many dancers—incorporating vastly different styles—that the camera somewhat chaotically races around trying to incorporate all of them. There are benefits to this—I particularly enjoyed the average-looking extras doing their own little twirls in the corners of the screen, recalling the delightful background activity of Jacques Demy’s The Young Girls of Rochefort. Too often, however, it feels like Chu isn’t directing, but herding.
There are also magical-realist choices—as when animated fabrics unfurl from the buildings during one of Vanessa’s numbers—that feel like aesthetic overkill. During a duet between Nina and her former beau Benny (Corey Hawkins, showcasing a terrific tenor), they start waltzing up the outside wall of their apartment building, essentially doing a Spider-dance. Like the anti-gravity flourish between Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling at Griffith Observatory in La La Land, the sequence at first feels a step too far, but it’s ultimately hard to resist the combination of audacity and romanticism.
La La Land, The Young Girls of Rochefort—this is good company to be in. If In the Heights is packed with enough bold choices to invite both effusive praise and endless nitpicking, that comes with the genre. Plus, you have Miranda’s music—a completely unique style that swerves from salsa, merengue, and samba to hip hop to traditional Broadway belters. To call In the Heights a melting-pot musical would be reductive; the movie has more culture than one pot could contain.
