A Broadway choreographer who directs as he once staged. Rob Marshall can make a room full of bodies move to music, and did it well in Chicago. Asked since to build whole worlds, he keeps the numbers and lets the film sag between them.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Rob Marshall when there are bodies to move. In Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), Jack Sparrow swings from a chandelier and rides the roof of a carriage through London, and for a few minutes the film has a lightness it never finds again. In The Little Mermaid (2023), Halle Bailey sings 'Part of Your World' and the picture wakes up. Marshall came to film from Broadway, where he danced and then choreographed, and he has never stopped thinking in numbers: a stretch of screen time with a beginning, a build and a finish, after which the lights change. The trouble is what happens when the lights change.
He made his screen debut with a television Annie in 1999 and his feature debut with Chicago (2002), a set of numbers held together by a plot short enough not to get in the way, and the film that made studios believe audiences would sit through singing again. He then tried a period drama without songs, Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), and went back to musicals with Nine (2009), Into the Woods (2014) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018), before The Little Mermaid. The shape of the career is a man who found one thing he could do superbly and has been asked, ever since, to do something slightly different with it.
When the thing he is asked to do is a number, he still delivers. We were frightened, properly, for ten minutes of a 12A about pirates, because Marshall stages the mermaids' arrival in On Stranger Tides as he would a song: one figure surfaces beside a rowing boat and sings, then there are more, then the water turns on the sailors, and Dariusz Wolski keeps the faces under the surface visible only when they choose to be. It is the one sequence in that film that remembers the sea is dangerous. Bailey's four minutes in The Little Mermaid work the same way; she is given a beginning and an end and nothing to cross.
Crossing is where he goes dull. On Stranger Tides runs 136 minutes and is mostly a walk. The Little Mermaid runs 135, and its second hour is where the caution shows; Dion Beebe, who has shot three of his films, gives the underwater kingdom a grey-green haze that reads as murk, so that Ariel's red hair is often the only thing in the frame we can follow. The complaint about Into the Woods was that the camera followed the action and did little else, and we recognise that from the films we have seen. John Myhre on production design and John DeLuca as choreographer and producer build him rooms to stage in. Nobody, on the evidence, builds the corridor between them.
He is at his best when the plot is short and the room is small. Someone should give him one of those again.
Biography
Rob Marshall is an American film and theatre director, producer and choreographer. Born on 17 October 1960 in Madison, Wisconsin, he was raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and trained at Carnegie Mellon University.
He began his career in theatre and made his feature-film debut directing the 2002 musical Chicago, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Marshall has since directed Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), Nine (2009), Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011), Into the Woods (2014), Mary Poppins Returns (2018) and The Little Mermaid (2023), on which he also served as producer. He is a six-time Tony Award nominee and has received an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
