Hairspray (2007)

There is a certain kind of 2007 musical that arrives determined to make everyone feel good about themselves, and Hairspray is its most efficient specimen. Adam Shankman's film, a remake by way of a Broadway stage show by way of John Waters, sets its sights on 1962 Baltimore and finds there a teenager named Tracy Turnblad who wants to dance on television and, incidentally, dismantle segregation. The picture is buoyant, brightly lit, and entirely sincere about its two great themes: that a plus-size girl can be a star, and that a dance show should not be divided along color lines. Both messages arrive with a tap shoe and a smile.

The more insistent current is racial. The Corny Collins Show operates a monthly Negro Day, a concession the film treats as an outrage, not a courtesy, and the plot's engine is the campaign to end it. Queen Latifah presides over the record shop and the moral center. Elijah Kelley teaches the heroine to dance and courts her sheltered friend. That the leads remain white while the civil rights struggle supplies the stakes is a tension the film never resolves, though it does cast its villain as an avowed racist and lets a young Black dancer take the crown. The body-positive thread runs just as deep, since Tracy's size is the obstacle, the joke, and eventually the anthem.

John Travolta in a fat suit and a housedress continues the franchise's drag tradition, though the film has no interest in what that tradition might mean beyond a fond punchline. Michelle Pfeiffer supplies the sizeist and segregationist antagonist, and a feminist reading is available without ever being argued. The sermonizing stays light because the songs do the work. When a message threatens to become a lecture, a horn section arrives to drown it out. A genial artifact, then. It believes in integration, self-acceptance, and the box office, in roughly that order.