Idina Menzel

Elsa runs up a mountain, and for a couple of minutes Frozen (2013) stops being a fairy tale about a girl who must hide what she can do and becomes a film about a woman who has decided not to. The palace grows out of a staircase in walls of blue ice, and over it Idina Menzel puts a full Broadway belt, the kind built to reach the back of a theatre and never asked to reach a microphone. It is the best stretch in the film, and Disney has not managed anything as good in years. The animators draw the palace; the voice is what makes it go up.

That voice was a stage instrument long before anybody drew a picture to it. Menzel made her name as Maureen in Rent (1996), then as Elphaba in Wicked (2003, and in the West End in 2006), and between the two roles you can see the shape of her career: fierce women, usually on the outside of things, frightened of their own force and eventually letting it out. Elsa is the same woman with a fjord behind her. Television found her a version of the part too, as Shelby Corcoran on Glee (2010 to 2013), and she went back to Broadway with If/Then (2014). Then, six years after Frozen, she turned up in Uncut Gems (2019) as Dinah Ratner and did not sing a note.

We did not expect to be got at by a Disney princess singing on a staircase, and we were, and the reason is plain: the note goes up at exactly the moment a character who has spent her whole life keeping it down decides to stop. That is Menzel's trick, on stage and on screen. She sings like someone being let out of a room. It works in Arendelle because Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee build the first forty minutes towards it and Christophe Beck's score, with its chanted Nordic voices, gives the belt something cold to melt.

Uncut Gems takes the instrument away and finds there is an actor underneath. As Dinah, stuck in Howard's orbit, she is sharp, tired and entirely unimpressed by him, and Menzel suggests a life running alongside Adam Sandler's chaos rather than inside it. The film does not follow her into that life; it is Howard's picture, and Menzel and Julia Fox are left doing a great deal of reacting to a man who never stops talking. We wanted more of her, which is at least the right complaint to have about a supporting part.

Menzel has said she yearned "to be part of something that was different from what people expected for me", and Uncut Gems is proof it can be done. The danger is the opposite one: that the voice is so large it is the only thing directors can hear. The next interesting film she makes will be the one that casts her for her stillness and then, late on, lets her open her mouth.