Hairspray
By David Schmader

Written and directed in 1988 by trash auteur John Waters, Hairspray has proven a much deeper well of inspiration than anyone could’ve imagined. The year 2003 brought the stage adaptation, which transformed Waters’s quirky charmer into a Tony-winning Broadway musical. Now the movie and the musical are followed by the movie musical, completing an adaptive hat trick so unexpected it must make its peerlessly pervy creator wake up smiling.

John Waters’s Hairspray was a revelation. After two decades spent horrifying all comers with shamelessly filthy independent films, Waters tried something new with his first studio film, a PG-rated musical comedy set in the early ’60s and tracking the blossoming of Tracy Turnblad, an effervescent girl of size who achieves her dreams of dancing stardom and finds her calling as a segregation-busting teen leader. The result was a near-perfect film, rendered in a skewed but miraculously harmonious style and imbued with a freaky sweetness that was irresistible.

Plenty of folks felt similar love for the Broadway musical, which turned Tracy’s tale into a singing, dancing extravaganza, and the leap back to the cinema seemed somehow natural. Tragically, two major misfortunes hobble the readaptation. One is John Travolta, hideously miscast as Tracy’s mother, Edna. This is drag as your dad would do it, if your dad were developmentally disabled, wedged in a state-of-the-art fat suit, and drunk on Robitussin. Between the mincing and constantly mutating accent, I found Travolta unwatchable. (And I’ve seen Battlefield Earth all the way through.)

Equally problematic is the new film’s klutziness with the old film’s elegantly handled themes of racial prejudice and the fight for integration. The original Hairspray found Tracy sating her teenage need for rebellion by challenging racial barriers; the new Hairspray suggests that a fat white girl from Baltimore single-handedly dreamed up the civil rights movement. “We’ve done enough dancing,” says movie-musical Tracy. “Now it’s time to march!” The words land like gospel on her grateful audience of darkies, who gamely play along. You don’t have to.

HAIRSPRAY DIR. ADAM SHANKMAN | RATED PG | AT THEATERS EVERYWHERE