Like Hamilton, In the Heights jolts the audience into new perspectives
Still, I wish Lin-Manuel Miranda had asked more of us.
Lin-Manuel Miranda’s music has been the soundtrack for both of my family’s pandemic summers. Like many people who could never afford a Broadway ticket to see the original cast perform Hamilton, we scheduled our whole Fourth of July weekend last summer around watching the filmed version on Disney+. This summer In the Heights, a screen adaptation of Miranda’s first Broadway musical, is being marketed as the reason to return to movie theaters. (It is also streaming on HBO Max for those of us with unvaccinated children.)
Compared to Hamilton—Miranda’s hip-hop musical about America’s founding that has made him a household name—In the Heights doesn’t carry the world-historical weight of the American Revolution on its shoulders. It occupies, literally and symbolically, much smaller terrain: just a few city blocks in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan where Miranda, whose parents moved there from Puerto Rico, grew up. Under Jon M. Chu’s direction, however, the small confines of those blocks expand to hold the capacious, spiraling dreams of Usnavi (played by Anthony Ramos), a first-generation Dominican immigrant, and his childhood friends as they navigate their relationship to a neighborhood that is quickly gentrifying.
The characters are all wrestling with the question of whether they should—and whether they can—stay in the neighborhood that formed them. Their dreams—to return to the Caribbean, to move downtown and break into the fashion world, to make good on their family’s sacrifice to send them to an elite school—seem to be driving them away. But the neighborhood, a pastiche of cultures, languages, and life experiences forced together by economic necessity and, long before that, by the forces of colonialism and slavery, won’t let them go. Through electrifying spectacles of dance, song, color, and light, the film insists that the beautiful particularity of immigrant cultures add something irreplaceable to the tapestry of American life.
