“How can they hear the truth above the roar?”

Chicago, for my money, has got to be one of the most well rounded movies ever made. The cast shines, the production is impeccable, the story is engaging, the music and choreography are wonderful—everything about it comes together to create pure entertainment. Entertainment. A spectacle. A couple hours of flash . . . that’s it, right?

Nope. Sorry, kid. In one of the musical’s best numbers, “Razzle Dazzle,” Richard Gere quips: “how can they see with sequins in their eye?” Well, just as that question implies, there is something to see behind all the flash—there is truth above the roar.

But, basics first: Chicago is a musical, set in prohibition era Chicago, about a bored housewife—Roxie Hart—who wants to be a singing/dancing star. To this end, Roxie cheats on her husband, but ends up killing her lover, whom she thought was going to break her into show business.

Coincidentally, once in a women’s prison, Roxie does achieve a fame of sorts, as her story becomes the Michael Jackson/Kobe Bryant/O.J. Simpson case of the day. Her lawyer, the “silver-tongued prince of the courtroom” Billy Flynn—with much singing and dancing from the cast along the way—eventually gets Roxie acquitted via the sleight-of-hand trickery described in “Razzle Dazzle.” He doesn’t, however, even consider taking the case of an innocent prison mate of hers, and the woman is hung just before the conclusion of Roxie’s trial.

Once free, Roxie gives the final brush-off to her still-faithful husband, Amos, and at long last becomes a famous performer, pairing with fellow acquitted murderer and Flynn client, Velma Kelly. The final scene of the film has Roxie and Velma—both of whom literally got away with murder—receiving the accolades of a virtual “all of Chicago,” as they take their bows after the last number.

So, what else is there to it? Thematically speaking, it seems that all we have is a celebration of fame at any cost. A trumpeting of the lack of justice in the world. Perhaps we can just temper these ideas with others, and move on. But again, I believe that there’s something to be heard above this roar of the evil prospering and the upright suffering. Quite simply, just like in the line from the song, I think that truth is what we’re listening for. Behind the flash—ironically, paradoxically—Chicago turns out to be an affirmation of truth itself.

See, the real beauty of the film is that the audience is in on the joke the whole time. We know the real story, while the wool is being pulled over the movie world’s eyes. We know what there is to see, despite the sequins. And even if no one in the movie sees it, and even if Roxie and Velma unjustly “win” in the end, it is still apparent that—in the words of the X-Files—“the truth is out there.”

Yes, nowadays it’s hard to see the truth in the midst of hundred-channel television and the Internet and politics and the shrinking of the world and mass media and celebrity worship and increasing relativism and on and on. This is our postmodern world, and Chicago recognizes that the truth will always be filtered through all of this fragmentation, and doesn’t play games with it. I even sense, in the otherwise inexplicable blurring and shaking of the final shots of the movie, the filmmaker’s sense of unease at this state of things. It’s as if the final, unsaid words of the film were: “yes, this is how things are in postmodernity, but that doesn’t mean you have to like it.” Still, even when blurred by smoke and mirrors, truth is nevertheless lurking onstage.

I think this is the main spiritual insight of the film: that the truth really is that hard to see, that sometimes we wonder if there’s truth at all, that sometimes it sure seems like there isn’t truth, but that there really is—past the flash of the sequins, above the roar—truth. And the next relevant question has to be: “alright, then . . . what is the truth?”

Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Maybe there’s something to that.