In the Heights is the latest high-energy stage musical adaptation from Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, and if you really liked its predecessor it’s probably safe to say you’ll like the latest too. Only less.
Accessible by HBO subscription or digital rental, it is essentially Hamilton in the ghetto with fewer clothes on.
Strong in spectacle, street-smart panache, and an almost desperate sense of wanting to be liked, In the Heights offers a series of colourful, up-tempo song-and-dance routines loosely strung along a thin narrative thread. Only this time instead of an American founding father and his high-profile historical associates, the immigrant heroes are an everyman shopkeeper from the Dominican Republic, his hair stylist love interest, a grandma to the whole neighbourhood, and various other characters drawn from the barrio.
The dance numbers are ambitious and well-orchestrated. The tone is forcefully, almost infectiously celebratory. For Hamilton fans, the music will be at once familiar and less memorable.
I can say honestly I was entertained by it, but I can’t say I particularly enjoyed it.
No doubt many readers will. Some significant faction might even think it miserly of me to dislike such a grinning, ostentatiously carefree, herculean expenditure of energy. I can almost hear the mutterings, “Not everything needs to be serious – this is a summer movie simply trying to show us a good time!”
I would tend to agree. And that’s the problem.
People watch movies in different moods for different reasons, it is true. A common reason might be something like, “I just want to chill out for a little while, relax, and not have to think too much.”
A common response from people like me might be, “That desire is simply lazy, and therefore wrong.”
I don’t think such persons are wrong to want to relax. But I do think they are probably wrong in thinking this is all they really want.
At the risk of brash presumption, I think what most people really want when they sit down to watch even a lighthearted summer movie is to enjoy something without having to think too much, not primarily for primarily relaxation but spiritual refreshment.
My conviction about this comes from the big-picture purpose of stories.
Through history, most humans spent most of their time and energy doing things like hunting antelope and spinning cloth, baking bread, and tending the needy. Those precious few hours of leisure dedicated to storytelling, then, are meant to remind them why they did so.
The story of the first antelope, for example, or the goddess who gave the spindle, or the loaves that fell from heaven, or the hero who made the first medicine – these commemorations of extraordinary events remind listeners of the basic patterns of reality underlying and lending dignity to ordinary affairs.
Stories, in other words, remind their hearers what their lives mean, principally in relation to whatever is everlasting and of supreme importance.
In this regard the basic problem with stories like In the Heights is that they transport us neither high enough nor low enough. Rather than granting us an imaginative foretaste of heaven or descent into hell, they only dance across the glittering surface of a world we already know.
Such narrative fare, while it may well entertain a human soul, will never really satisfy.
Saying the same thing in a different register, it is notable that when Lin-Manuel Miranda himself appears as a character in the film it is as a street vendor hawking shaved ice. Rather like the brightly coloured sugar water he serves up to passersby on the street, In the Heights itself offers a fleeting thrill but not much in the way of real nourishment.
I for one can enjoy a popsicle for a few minutes, but if I am going to sit down for a couple of hours, I would prefer something with a little more substance.
