In the Heights

The streets were made of music…

Ever since two Octobers past when we saw “Hamilton” downtown and became lifelong fans of it, we’ve been curious about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s earlier work, “In the Heights.” As the advertising juggernaut got started for a film version of ITH, we were hopeful, but we also had our expectations tempered by the possibility that it was a studio cash-grab on the Miranda brand.

And then the pandemic came, and our relationship to the real humans that inspired ITH became a whole lot less academic. As it happened, we fell sick early in the pandemic’s raging through the island. While we had some food, during our sickness and long two-week isolation, our very lives were supported by the faces that dropped our dinner and groceries and walked warily away: the “essential workers.”

Brown faces, to a man. Spanish-speaking voices, to a man.¹

America relies upon those faces, and it certainly praises them and their “bravery” and “sacrifice,” but does it ever see them? In a major way, ITH is an invitation to, if only through the vehicle of fiction if only for a few hours, to see them and see their world. While that world, as presented in ITH is simplified and idealized, it’s an invitation to think about the “essential” working class, to remember that many of our ancestors were once that that class, and to recognize that dreams, hard work, and family are at the root of the American dream we all share.²

And I’m glad to say that this simple story, sweetly-told shimmers on-screen with humor, love, energy, and dancing. Having seen it once in the theatres, we’ve already watched it again at home on HBO Max. That said, if you’re comfortable in a theatre, we saw it in Dolby and consider it well worth it for the spectacle of color and music that defines this film.

The foundation of ITH, of course, is the lyrical gymnastics of Miranda and the adaptation of Quiara Alagria Hudes. Let’s deal with the Hamilton Miranda in the room. Firmly established as a gymnast with the lexicon of one language, Miranda shows he’s equally dextrous and clever in another language. On top of that, he even delights in working word choices and puns in both the languages, at the same time, in conversation with each other. With English, Spanish, and “Spanglish” as pigments to paint with, the rhymes, asides, and self-debating in-jokes are all the more abundant. If the density, joy, and acrobatics of “Hamilton’s” “My Shot” set a bar for you, you’ll find similar, ahem, heights, explored in ITH.

With Miranda’s place (already!) firmly fixed in the firmament of Broadway legend, one might well have expected that collaboration wouldn’t have been a strong suit for Mr. Miranda. But amazingly, as befits a man who’s extolled the virtues of diversity and tolerance, Miranda’s collaboration with Jon M. Chu has allowed the story to avoid the trap of being “filmed Broadway” and, instead, stand on its own as a fun movie. In this, ITH is more “Singin’ in the Rain” than “West Side Story.”

A particular joy of director Chu’s Crazy, Rich Asians was its celebration of color, filming of food, demonstration of cultural pride, and gentle suffusion of love and tenderness. It’s obvious that that knack would play well as we explore the casas of the barrio.

So, lyrics, storytelling, directoral vision, what else does this story have? Colores. Living in Manhattan, I can tell you, brownstones, tenement buildings, and apartment towers are boring on the outside. Even the toniest stoops around the corner from the Guggenheim or the library are boring in their coloration: brown brick, brown stone, or a neutral mausoleum grisaille.

Chu with cinematographer Alice Brooks wisely say “the hell with reality, let’s make New York working-class neighborhoods colorful.” The majority of this winds up being expressed in the costumes of the denizens, but every chance where there’s any opportunity to add more color, they do. It’s interesting to contrast ITH here against “West Side Story” whose pre-urban-renewal (much lower) West side (razed and buried underneath Lincoln Center) incorporated stage tropes like colored backgrounds that broke the “reality” and firmly reminded the audience it was watching Broadway set among reality, not a movie.

And breaking the stage play into the neighborhood allows for me to see a Manhattan I recognize on the screen. It’s still the New York of Home Alone 2 or Maid in Manhattan or The Warriors or Sex and the City, but it has respect for how west-siders (regardless of their cross street) are a little bit different. Their sunsets extend into the vastness of the sunset. We take our vistas with a heavy dose of bridge across a river that breathes in and out; we stare into greenery, the real greenery of New Jersey; our western edge is a river of asphalt that’s fenced in by ancient trees astride the river that built America as she came into the rush of titan. The Hudson figures largely in our self-conception and gives us a much more nature-aware bearing than would be found in Alphabet City or Downtown.

The plot is something about dreams within a poorer, more-heavily immigrant community: obtaining financial stability, knowing that one had been virtuous, launching a business, becoming an artist, being the first to graduate college, finding citizenship, etc. All of these are the dreams of the characters in this world, but none of them run terribly deep nor do any of them occasion great drama. What we get, instead, are wonderful, kind, beautiful characters being good and decent against challenging circumstances.

What’s not to like?

Footnotes

1. It might surprise readers that regardless the cuisine, the delivery staff are (if the eagle devouring a serpent iconography be believed) dominantly Mexican. Even when ordering Thai food, its usually a Mexican immigrant steering the battery-augmented two wheeler laden with food.
2. A part that hit me emotionally and drove this home was a segment of the opening number “In the Heights” where, after watching 3 minutes of brown and black faces walk down walk-up stairs, slug coffee, and mount buses, we see them in their places of work: doctors, lawyers, nurses, mechanics, and yes, kitchen staff. If the ITH demographic is “forgotten” it’s because they contribute when the chips are down and when the chips are not down silently: “making the East Side shine,” swabbing PCRE tests, taking care of kids, and representing the unlucky in court. For what it's worth, the Lincoln Center theatre erupted in cheers after that last note.