Rob Marshall
Rob Marshall is a director, born 1960.
Marshall came to film from Broadway choreography and has never once hidden it. Every picture he makes is organised around the number: where the camera is when the dancing starts, how a cut can keep a body's line intact, what a musical sequence can do that a scene cannot. He holds a Primetime Emmy for directing a variety series, and he directed a version of Annie in 1999 before features.
Chicago in 2002 is the achievement. The device it runs on, staging every song inside Roxie's head so a realist crime story is allowed to detonate into vaudeville, gave the screen musical a way to exist again after two decades of embarrassment about itself. It won him the Directors Guild award for feature directing and brought Academy Award, Golden Globe and BAFTA nominations. The film is fast, cruel and genuinely well cut, and its influence on everything that followed is hard to overstate.
What came after has been handsome, expensive and noticeably less alive. Memoirs of a Geisha, then Nine, then a long Disney run: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Into the Woods, Mary Poppins Returns, The Little Mermaid. The staging remains superb, the storytelling remains careful, and caution is exactly what large studio properties want from a director. He is a first-rate maker of sequences who has spent twenty years being handed material that rewards safety.
Movies (10)
TV (1)
Where to start with Rob Marshall
Chicago and nothing else, for the first watch. It is the film that justifies the whole career, and if it does not work on you then the rest of the list will not either.
If it does, Into the Woods is the best of the later run, because Sondheim's material has enough thorns in it to resist being smoothed. Mary Poppins Returns is the purest demonstration of his craft as a stager, gorgeous and slightly airless, and Memoirs of a Geisha is where the visual polish is at its most beautiful and its most criticised. Nine is the interesting failure, an ambitious swing with a cast that should have worked. Approach The Little Mermaid and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides as jobs of work rather than as personal films, because that is fairly clearly what they were.