I finally entered a movie theater — Great Barrington’s Triplex — for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020. It was a matinee, and there were only 20–25 people in attendance. But, as somebody who usually went to 5 or 6 films a month, this was a major event — a re-entry into a world I love. Seats were distanced and a number of people wore masks, so I felt there was no danger to my health. Consequently, I was able to give my two hours over to passionately watching the screen.
The film playing was Lin-Manuel Miranda’s movie-musical version of his 2008 Broadway hit, “In the Heights,” which preceded his mega-hit “Hamilton.” From the first scene on, I could feel the vast difference between finally being in a theater watching a film and the months spent during the pandemic looking at innumerable screeners on my computer and television set. I felt riveted to every detail of “In the Heights” projected on the screen — the use of space, the characters’ emotional reactions, and every aspect of the urban setting that is central to the film. My mind never wandered, and I felt emotionally linked to a film for the first time in a year and a half. I was able to immerse myself in the world of a film with my whole self, rather than the detached, disrupted manner in which I viewed screeners.
There was another aspect of the film that held special interest for me. My parents lived in a Mitchell–Lama co-op in Washington Heights for the last 30 years of their lives, beginning in the early 1960s. More importantly, I had vivid memories of its streets because, in the mid-‘60s, I myself lived in Washington Heights. I resided in a Depression-era beige brick apartment house (in a very cheap, three-room apartment with barred windows) in a declining neighborhood then rapidly changing from Jewish and Irish to Hispanic. It was an area that, by the 1980s, had become predominantly Dominican. In fact, today it’s the most prominent Dominican community in the U.S. The crack cocaine crisis of the 1980s and 1990s had a horrific impact on the Heights, and drug dealing and addiction were rife. However, today the neighborhood is much safer, and it has begun to experience some upward mobility, as well as gentrification, with its white population beginning to slowly grow.
Miranda’s “In the Heights” is a musical, and makes no pretense of being a realistic evocation of an urban world. So the film avoids centering on the neighborhood’s social problems or structure. It focuses on romance, dreams of escape and mobility, and the ultimate power of community. Its central figure is the young, hard-working, sweet bodega owner Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), who dreams of returning to the Dominican Republic and opening a beachside bar. He’s diffidently in love with the artistic Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who wants to escape her job in a beauty salon to become a designer downtown. There is also Nina (Leslie Grace) who is the neighborhood role model and heroine, having gotten into Stanford. However, after being given an effusive welcome, she tells her friends she wants to drop out because she is disturbed by the university’s racism and feels isolated from her community back home. She also has an ex-boyfriend, Benny (Corey Hawkins), who still pines for her while working as a dispatcher at her father’s cab company.
Everybody in the neighborhood has dreams of escape, such as winning the lottery or, more prosaically, moving their beauty salon to the Grand Concourse. But, though Miranda knows all about the desire to escape, this is a romantic, optimistic film that exalts in the always-vibrant neighborhood, and makes one ultimately feel there is never a reason to leave home. For there’s no problem — growing gentrification, broken romances, a heat wave and a blackout — that can’t be mitigated by a song and dance number in which the whole block, and sometimes the entire neighborhood, participates.
Some of the overly percussive numbers seem repetitive and involve too much cutting, but at best they become an embodiment of Usnavi’s proclamation that “the streets were made of music.” The film contains some hip-hop, romantic ballads, an Esther Williams-esque swimming pool scene and a dreamlike subway ballad performed by Olga Merediz’s sentimentalized Abuela Claudia, the neighborhood’s grandmother. Many of the dance numbers, choreographed by Christopher Scott, include Latinx styles of dance: Mambo, Son, and Afro-Cuban.
But it’s the use of the Heights’ real streets that I find most striking. Yes, the film removes the grit and the dark side of the neighborhood, but the domino and card players, the beauty salons, phone and financial services stores, with signs in Spanish and English, can be seen on every block. The avenues are busy, crowded with pedestrians and people sitting on stoops and grocery stores and restaurants. Miranda may inflate the sense of community and its relative well-being, but he has successfully made the neighborhood a centerpiece of the film and will probably accelerate its gentrification.
Miranda has made an escapist, commercial, extremely watchable film that touches on the neighborhood’s powerlessness, but avoids defining the film in those terms. The message he wants the audience to receive is one of hope, and the possibility of mobility. Nina may not like being at elitist Stanford, but she’s going back so she can become a lawyer for undocumented immigrants. All the other characters, including Usnavi, will have their dreams realized back in Washington Heights and, of course, the romances will all neatly work out. While far from a masterwork, it was a perfect film for the return to my temple — the movie house.
