160 min | PG-13 | July 3, 2020 | Disney+
Lin-Manuel Miranda turns a founding father’s life into hip-hop and casts actors of color as the white men who built America. Thomas Kail films the original Broadway production and drags the camera up onto the stage. It does not film the show so much as catch it alive.
Hamilton is a filmed capture of the original Broadway production, shot on stage with the cast that built the show. The story follows Alexander Hamilton from orphaned immigrant to founding father to the man on the ten-dollar bill. The casting is the argument. Black and Latino actors play the white men who founded the country, and the founders speak in hip-hop. The film is about who gets to claim the American origin story and who controls the record after the people inside it are dead.
Lin-Manuel Miranda plays Hamilton as a man who cannot stop writing or talking, driven by the certainty that he will die young. Leslie Odom Jr. plays Aaron Burr as the patient counterweight, watching and calculating while Hamilton burns through every room. Odom Jr. carries the show’s quietest and most dangerous energy. Renée Elise Goldsberry delivers Angelica Schuyler’s “Satisfied” as a rapid-fire reconstruction of a single moment, rewinding the scene in real time. Phillipa Soo plays Eliza with a stillness that holds the final act together. Daveed Diggs splits Lafayette and Jefferson into two distinct bodies, loose and fast and impossible to ignore.
Thomas Kail directs both the stage production and this capture, and he refuses to let the camera sit in a single house seat. The camera climbs onto the stage, moves between the performers, and cuts to close-ups that a theater audience never sees. The production turns on a double revolving stage, and Kail uses the rotation to pull characters toward and away from each other in motion. During Angelica’s “Satisfied” the ensemble freezes and reverses while she walks through the frozen frame, and the camera makes the trick land. Lin-Manuel Miranda writes the book, music, and lyrics, and the score moves from hard hip-hop to R&B to traditional Broadway without seams. The sound mix keeps every dense lyric intelligible, which matters when the words arrive this fast.
The film makes a case that a stage show can survive translation to a screen without losing what makes it live. Kail keeps the sweat and the immediacy of a performance happening in one room on one night. The story bends history to put the people usually erased from it at the center, and it knows exactly what it is doing. It asks who tells your story and then answers by telling this one on its own terms. The result is the rare filmed musical that earns the camera instead of merely tolerating it.