In The Heights, Returning to Theaters, and the Importance of Representation

While I’ve always been a big fan of action and sci-fi flicks, the movie I’ve been most excited about seeing this summer has been Lin-Manuel Miranda’s (Hamilton) and Jon Chu’s (Crazy Rich Asians) musical extravaganza In The Heights. 

In the Heights is based on Miranda’s first hit Broadway musical that was a love letter to the Latinx Washington Heights neighborhood near where he grew up in New York City.

The musical is pretty light on plot, serving primarily as a character study of a neighborhood full of immigrants from countries like the Dominican Republic and Cuba, and people who have moved to the mainland from Puerto Rico. The focus is on a group of friends and potential lovers and circles around immigrant bodega owner Usnavi and an aging Cuban abuela. There’s more to the story, but that’s all you really need to know. (And it doesn’t hurt if you know a bit of Spanish.) The movie has received mostly positive reviews, highlighting the vibrant music and dancing.

Heights is from Warner Brothers, which means it debuted simultaneously in the theaters and on HBO Max. (As an experiment this year, WB gave all of their major releases a month on HBO Max at the same time the movies opened in theaters. The studio is not planning to continue doing this in 2022.0

As excited as I was to see it in the theater, I first watched it at hone on HBO with the subtitles on. As any Hamilton fan knows, Miranda’s lyrics stream out at a firehouse pace and with my aging hearing, I really liked having the words on the screen to help me appreciate the depth of his writing.  The next evening I went with my Dear Wife and some friends to see it on the big screen, which is where you really want to see it with the spectacular Busby Berkeley style dance number at the swimming pool and the percussive Latin music surrounding you. 

One thing it is not is star studded, unless you are a Broadway fan. Bodega owner and narrator Usnavi is played by Anthony Ramos, who debuted the dual roles of John Laurens and Phillip Hamilton in Hamilton; and “Abuela” Claudia is portrayed by Olga Merediz, who played the role of the neighborhood matriarch for the show’s entire Broadway run. Jimmy Smits is the only well-known actor in the cast.   (Miranda, who debuted Usnavi on Broadway, has a small part of the piragua guy I.e., the guy selling sno cones.)

Disappointingly, In The Heights has not been particularly commercially successful so far. Among the possible explanations are that it has no stars, it doesn’t have a strong narrative, people don’t know the Broadway show it’s based on, it’s the story of a city block rather than a person, and it’s a story about Latinx culture.

The movie has also faced charges of “colorism,” that is, featuring primarily light-skinned actors in the lead rolls of a story about a Black Latinx community that has people in it of a wide range of skin tones. Aja Romano has written a good explainer on this topic for Vox, looking at how light-skinned Black actors have long been more common in media productions than actors with dark skin. In my skimming of reviews at Rotten Tomatoes, I saw very little mention of this. Notably the one review I saw that did discuss this issue was by a Latinx writer. 

The discussion about this went far enough that composer Lin-Manuel Miranda felt compelled to respond to it on Twitter:

For the record, I absolutely loved the movie both times I’ve seen it.  If our local community movie theater is able to bring it in next month, I would love to see it again in the theater. I understand and respect the criticisms of it, but I still really loved this movie and hope I someday get to see the stage version of it.