Film: Hamilton
HAMILTON Disney+
Watch a rap musical about Alexander Hamilton, Founding Father of the United States? For two hours and 40 minutes?
I’d rather stick pins in my eyes – that’s what I thought when Lin-manuel Miranda’s Hamilton premièred off Broadway in 2015. I don’t like rap. I don’t much like recent musicals. And I don’t like history being dumbed down.
How appallingly wrong I was. Everything the critics raved about five years ago was spot on. Hamilton is a quite staggering reinvention of the musical form – and history-writing.
That remains true in this film version of the musical. Films of on-stage musicals usually have the deadly feel of Mummy and Daddy’s camcorder recording of the school play – they feel literally stagey. Hamilton is so good that it survives the huge suspension of disbelief required to believe any film of actors on stage.
Miranda’s unprecedented, daring move was to tell the story of Alexander Hamilton (1755/7-1804) in a thoroughly modern way. All the main characters were white in real life; they are almost all played by black or Hispanic actors. And yet it never for a moment feels right-on or preachy.
Practically the whole dialogue is told in rap – the kiss of death for historical drama, surely? But instead it produces a sort of magic. Gone is almost a century of Hollywood trying and failing to talk in Olden Days Speak – ‘Yonda is da castle of mah faddah, da dook,’ as Tony Curtis was fond of saying in swashbuckling movies.
Instead, the characters – from Hamilton, played brilliantly by an understated Miranda, to George
Washington and Thomas Jefferson – talk in accents and language straight out of 21st-century Harlem, while wearing rich, pink, crushed-velvet tailcoats, waistcoats and riding boots.
There is a constant comedy in the disconnect between ancient and modern. The disconnect is so great that there’s no point in looking for historical solecisms. And Miranda can dial the joke up or down by increasing that historical contrast whenever he wants.
Running alongside that comedy is admirably highbrow dialogue, based on Ron Chernow’s 2004 biography of Hamilton.
Can you imagine raps about the development of American tax policy and the Federalist Papers – the 85 essays written by Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay? Can you imagine them not being boring or embarrassing?
Well, these are neither. Watch Hamilton and you end up with an extremely good, serious introduction to America’s founding years.
The War of Independence (in which Hamilton fought bravely) is covered, with a simpering, arrogant cameo by Jonathan Groff as a George III who treats America like a mistress who’s spurned him. Washington’s presidency and the rise of Thomas Jefferson (a sublime, camp, bluesy Daveed Diggs) fit neatly around the main skeleton of Hamilton’s life.
And what a life it was. Born illegitimate in Nevis, in the Caribbean, and orphaned young, Hamilton rose to become the financial genius of the early American Republic. He not only was the first Secretary of the Treasury; he also promoted the American Constitution, worked out how to fund the states’ debts and set up America’s first central banks, the Bank of North America and the First Bank of the United States.
To qualify as a musical hero, he needs flaws. Bingo! In 1797, Hamilton starred in independent America’s first sex scandal, betraying his wife with Maria Reynolds, a married 23-year-old, when he was 34. Reynolds’s husband proceeded to blackmail Hamilton.
Then, in 1804, he fought a duel with Vice-president Aaron Burr over an insult, and was killed.
It was always a juicy story. How much juicier it is when invigorated by vital music, which zips you along at top pace. Even old musical clichés – the big group number that finishes with the cast gradually raising their uplifted hands to the sky – are boosted by this new historical-musical carapace in which they sit.
In the raging culture wars, some extremists have tried to ‘cancel’ Hamilton because, even though Hamilton was an abolitionist, he worked alongside slave-owners such as Jefferson and Washington.
The best way to counter such madness is to watch Miranda’s extraordinary new form of entertainment.