Review by Andrew Swafford
It’s difficult to place a value judgement on the #HamilFilm, as it seems like the people declaring “it is good” and the people declaring “it is bad” often have very different definitions not only of what “good” or “bad” is, but also what “it” is. When I ask myself “Is Hamilton good?,” I think I’m really asking myself three different questions:
Is Hamilton a good musical?
Is Hamilton a good film?
Is Hamilton a good political project?
These questions elicit a tricky, often contradictory, mess of responses from me, so for clarity’s sake, I’ll answer them each separately.
1. Is Hamilton a good musical?
It’s good! Although tastes are always bound to differ on which musical styles are corny and which are cool, I find Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hybridization of boom-bap rap delivery and traditional theatrical ballads to be a really compelling one, and they’re performed super well almost across the board – with the occasional exception of Miranda himself, who is far from a virtuosic singer. (Daveed Diggs, Jonathan Groff, and Renée Elise Goldsberry in particular are exceptionally good.) Miranda is first and foremost a writer, and while his writing isn’t necessarily virtuosic either in the same way that great rappers are, his verses are certainly worked over – he’s clearly picked through every line of this thing to finely tune every little bit of wordplay and rhythm to make a sung-through / rapped-through musical that remains surprising and impressive at just about every turn.
Also noteworthy is how much mileage he gets out of a more-or-less empty stage, managing to orchestrate numerous comprehensible locales and stunning setpieces with nothing more than a big cast, a rotating platform, and a few pieces of prop furniture. I’m not going to say it’s perfect or anything – its biggest flaw as a musical is maybe the pacing of the second half, which severely lacks the urgency of the first, save for the absolutely electric cabinet meetings between Hamilton and Jefferson – but this question, of the three, is the most open-and-shut in my eyes.
2. Is Hamilton a good film?
It’s pretty good! I was surprised almost immediately on how much this relies on camera movement and cutting to convey the weight of its plot beats, especially since this probably could have gotten away with just popping back and forth between three or four stationary positions. Director Thomas Kail cuts in close, for example, during the moment in King George III’s speech when Groff intentionally gets spittle all over his chin, which is by no means a necessary move but is certainly an effective one (of many) that demonstrates cinema’s potential to emphasize small gestures and direct the viewer’s attention accordingly. Could it have done more with the camera? Probably – but I’m honestly just impressed that it bothered to do anything at all.
And more than anything else, I’m grateful for this as a hopefully precedent-setting model for distributing pro-shot theater. I know there are examples here and there throughout history of plays and musicals getting released as films rather than adapted as films (see: the 90s Cats, all the BBC Shakespeare productions, etc.), but for the most part this almost never happens and it’s something that needs to happen basically all the time. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that Broadway as an institution is inherently elitist and classist because of the enormous geographical and financial barriers to experiencing even one or two works, but this is a problem that could be significantly mitigated if all productions just got pro-shot film releases, even if they waited a few years to sell tickets like this one did. The total normalization of film releases like this probably won’t happening anytime soon, but I’ll be ready to scream my excitement from all the rooftops in case a pro-shot Hadestown ever pops into existence, you have my word.
3. Is Hamilton a good political project?
It’s not great! More than anything else, I really wish it did what Emily Wilson did in her translation of The Odyssey (which opens with the line “Tell me about a complicated man”), but it functions mostly as a revisionist hagiography, completely erasing Hamilton’s ideological shortcomings and presenting his flaws as being limited merely to sexual impropriety – and even that is even given a sympathetic framing.
I don’t claim to be a scholar of American history or anything, but even the most cursory research brought me to a few key facts about Alexander Hamilton that Miranda’s play chooses to ignore:
Despite being seen by many (including Miranda) as a slavery abolitionist, Hamilton married into an incredibly wealthy slave-owning family primarily as a means of elevating his own social position, and even negotiated the buying and selling of slaves on behalf of this family.
He supported the Three-Fifths Compromise deeming each Black slave to be legally considered three-fifths of a person.
He supported Black soldiers in the military not because of slavery’s immorality but because it seemed like the only way to win the war, numbers-wise.
He only supported Black emancipation if slaveowners wished to exercise their property rights to do so.
He demanded slaves ~stolen~ by the British be returned to their ~rightful owners~.
He believed that American citizens’ voting power should be in direct proportion to how much property they owned, under the assumption that poor people couldn’t truly be trusted with the democratic franchise.
But learning history from Lin-Manuel Miranda is about as effective as learning history from Confederate statues, and it’s a lot harder to recognize you’re being lied to when Hamilton and company are played by impressive and charismatic actors of color. According to the musical, Alexander Hamilton was just a scrappy, bootstrap-yanking upstart with a love for his country and a calling to lead. His is an “American Dream” story of someone who rose to power through hard work and gumption, freeing his people from tyranny in a burgeoning utopia conveniently unoccupied by indigenous people.
It is a fact universally acknowledged, by this point, that Hamilton is one of the defining literary works of the Obama Era, as it’s guiding ethos is, to borrow a line from Cornel West, “Black faces in high places” – as if simply telling the story of the Founding Fathers with a Black cast is enough to reclaim the story for a more diverse world, as though the past has practically no thorny issues to grapple with. The story of the American Revolution is given a self-congratulatory, “what a time to be alive,” tone that feels like it comes directly from the “racism is over” part of the liberal brain during the Obama era – which is maybe related to that part of the conservative brain that glorifies the American Revolution despite being staunchly opposed to any and all protests more revolutionary than polite disagreement in the present.
In what is perhaps the musical’s most iconic number, “The Room Where it Happens,” several characters extol the virtues of political compromise and reaching across the aisle for the sake of having access to the levers of power. This has obvious resonances with Barack Obama’s political project – his “team of rivals” and all that – and it could potentially be simpatico with the historical reality about Hamilton, as one could charitably see him as an abolitionist-at-heart who had to “play ball” in order to maintain influence with the hopes of actually ending slavery later on down the line only to have his life cut short before he had the chance. The play later complicates the whole compromise-for-influence idea by presenting a foil to Hamilton in the form of Aaron Burr, a politician who believes in essentially nothing, seeking power more or less for its own sake; he is equated with Bush/Cheney in a line about being someone you could see yourself having a beer with.
But as for the supposed good guys here, neither Lin-Manuel Miranda nor proponents of the Obama presidency tend to grapple with the weight of these compromises or how little the supposed great men ended up to show for them. Hamilton forgoes advocating slavery abolition for…a proposed federal banking system that ended up being shot down? Obama gutted universal health care, deported and separated record numbers of Latin American families, and drone-striked countless Muslim children for…his Republican supreme court nomination to be overturned? Both of these stories should be about the inherent tragedy of compromise, how some positions should be non-negotiable (slavery!?!?) and how some people are not worth negotiating with (Mitch McConnell?!?!), but both Lin-Manuel Miranda and Obama stans hold up these figures as more or less worthy of sainthood.
On the other hand, there is obviously the matter of Hamilton literally dying because he places too much faith in the civil formalities of the dueling system (even after his son dies in the same manner), which could imply the reading I’m looking for here. Problem is, it doesn’t really come across that way, both because the script doesn’t explicitly tie Hamilton’s death to any characterization flaw or ideological blindspot and because the rest of the play’s framing of Hamilton as hero (especially at the very end) is just too overwhelming to be counterbalanced by his untimely death alone. Like, the character’s theme song isn’t “I Put Too Much Faith in Civic Institutions, Don’t I?” it’s “I’m Not Throwing Away My Shot” – consistent with Hamilton’s general framing as a hard-working aspirational figure. This allows the conspicuous insertion of pandering throwaway lines like “Immigrants – we get the job done,” but it comes at the expense of a more complicated and honest reckoning with history.
And on the off-chance that anyone is reading this and thinking that I’m not being enough of an “ally” to marginalized communities by going too hard on this thing, please remember / acknowledge that Toni freaking Morrison hated it so much that she commissioned a whole other play by Ishmael Reed called The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda in which the man himself is visited, Christmas Carol-style, by the ghosts of Native Americans, Harriet Tubman, and an outwardly racist Alexander Hamilton. Comparatively…I feel like I’m being very generous in separating the musical’s political content from its craft and entertainment value. I still ultimately like it on those grounds, despite everything.