TWO NEW FILMS SUCCEED, PARTLY BECAUSE OF WHAT THEY’RE NOT
WALL-E ****
DIRECTED BY Andrew Stanton
WITH THE VOICES OF Ben Burtt, Jeff Garlin, John Ratzenberger
US 2008 103 mins.
BURN AFTER READING ****
DIRECTED BY Joel and Ethan Coen
STARRING Frances McDormand, George Clooney, John Malkovich, Brad Pitt
US 2008 96 mins.
What a strange and wonderful thing WALL-E is – though not just because of what it is, but also because of what it isn’t. Probably not since Fantasia in 1940 has a cartoon been offered to kids that’s so unlike what kids are (usually) deemed to want. Almost all cartoons nowadays, even the good ones – like the very enjoyable Kung Fu Panda – operate by a set of ground-rules. Kids want chatter, and plenty of it, insults and one-liners and the whole sarcastic apparatus pumped out on TV by the Cartoon Network. Kids want lots of plot, twists and reversals and a little slapstick. Kids, in the worst cartoons (i.e. Shrek and its progeny) are deemed to want cheap irony, toilet humour and media in-jokes. Kids (or their parents) want cartoon characters voiced by celebrity actors, even when it serves no useful purpose (be honest; how many people even realised the Tigress in Panda was being voiced by Angelina Jolie?).
WALL-E does none of this. The first act – 20 minutes, maybe more – has virtually no dialogue, just a handful of movie clips (from Hello Dolly!, of all things) and the titular robot scuttling between skyscrapers of junk, its mission being to compact the junk into little square bricks which it then piles up into more skyscrapers (WALL stands for “Waste Allocation Load Lifter”). There’s a bit more talk once the film decamps to outer space, but again not much by cartoon standards – and WALL-E himself remains a resolutely non-verbal hero. I assumed there’d be a twist where he’s injected with a new computer-chip allowing him to speak fluently; I thought at least he’d do an E.T. and pick up a basic vocabulary, enough to say “Phone home” or something. None of this happens. All he does say – again and again – is “EVE”, the name of his beloved, an egg-shaped robot sent down to Earth to look for signs of life.
We’re in the future, of course, a post-materialist age when people aren’t just defined by their possessions, they’ve been elbowed out by them; the humans are in space, endlessly cruising in a fully-automated cruise ship, while the stuff remains behind on a blighted Earth. WALL-E likes to pick out baubles from the mountains of junk – a paddle with a ball on a string, a Rubik’s Cube, a diamond ring in a box (he throws away the ring, keeps the box) – but his relation to these things is entirely innocent. The difference may be this: most cartoon heroes are essentially 10-year-olds, noisy, hyperactive and already in thrall to pop-culture; WALL-E is essentially an infant, trusting and open to all experience.
One watches WALL-E with amazement: a film of such austere lines, such deliberate rhythm, such plain characters, so little ostensible plot, would be deemed hopelessly ‘arty’ if made for adults – yet here it is being intended for (and apparently appreciated by) children. It’s a testament to Pixar, the company that’s been making consistently great cartoons since Toy Story in 1995, and proof that working in creative places encourages people to challenge themselves. Director Andrew Stanton’s previous film was Finding Nemo, which was very good but conventionally noisy, hyperactive and garrulous (not much of Nemo in this one, though there is a stuffed fish singing ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’). Since then we’ve had The Incredibles, an action blockbuster in cartoon form; Cars, a (failed) attempt to make an old-fashioned ode to small-town values; Ratatouille, a cartoon about haute cuisine – and now WALL-E which is nothing less than a kiddie version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film explicitly referenced in the use of ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ and climactic showdown between Man and Omnipotent Machine. The ambition is breathtaking.
This may also be the place to mention that Stanton is a practising Christian – hence perhaps the EVE connection, WALL-E and his beloved being a new Adam and Eve standing on the brink of a new world. Hence also the taste for austerity and what might be called spiritual values, especially in the second half when we head to outer space and the cruise-ship containing what’s left of mankind. People have been turned into consumers, welded to little carts that transport them from place to place in permanent couch-potato mode, robots catering to their every whim; those who’ve read Cloud Atlas may be reminded of the Somni~451 chapter in that novel – and those who spend their evenings watching telly and ordering food for delivery will hopefully recognise themselves in these porcine, incurious humans, smothered by corporate coddling. (“Try blue. It’s the new red!” urges the robotic voice on the ship’s PA, and of course they all comply.)
WALL-E stands for less, less of everything – less talk, less slapstick, less frantic energy, less coddling, less consuming, less stuff in general. We live, of course, in a culture that prizes more (at least till the markets melt down completely) – more food, more money, more cars, more toys and gadgets. The film is unexpected, almost revolutionary. I admit I’d have liked a bit more energy (I admire it more than I love it) – but its scaled-down style allows important things to shine through. Sad-eyed WALL-E isn’t much of a hero; he has no special powers – in fact he has only one power, storing and compacting objects in his little pouch. But he has feelings. He’s shocked when he almost crushes his only friend (a cockroach), and of course he loves EVE madly, obsessively, and maybe that’s enough to save humanity. The film’s final, Beatles-tinged message may be quite a simple one, applicable both to kids and adults: Love is all you need.
Burn After Reading is even more scaled-down, possibly unsatisfying if you go in expecting a certain kind of movie – a glamorous romp with the likes of Brad Pitt and George Clooney, or perhaps an action comedy with spies and killers (something like Brangelina’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith from a couple of years ago). It may come across that way, but in fact it’s yet another sly joke by the Coen Brothers, continuing their taste for putting ordinary people side-by-side with cool, dangerous types – psycho killers, professional kidnappers, homicidal bikers. The film is a lovely bagatelle, a deliberate red herring – and a welcome corrective to No Country For Old Men, the bleak, worrying drama that won the Coens an Oscar last year.
The brothers apparently wrote the two scripts concurrently, alternating from one to the other – and it’s clear they saved their cynicism for Country and their humanism (albeit still sardonic humanism) for this one. When you’re placing characters like Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), a none-too-bright gym manager with dreams of liposuction, in the same film as Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a Princeton-educated CIA mandarin, the question is always balance: Who wins out, the glamorous types or the Everypeople? In the past, the Coens have tended to use the ordinary folk as relief from the main action (they “abide”, like the Dude in Big Lebowski); after all the bad stuff happened in Fargo, there was Marge (McDormand again) and her hubby, sitting together in bed talking about their little lives. No Country swung the balance in the other direction, none of the Everypeople being a match for Javier Bardem’s implacable killer (Death, the Devil, call him what you will).
Here, for the first time, the glamorous types – spies, secret agents, people who carry guns – turn out to be wrong, not just morally misguided but utterly wrong about everything. The film plays with the clichés of the spy genre: there’s an urgent percussive score, the opening titles blink onto the screen with that beeping effect (like they’re being typed by some hi-tech computer), mysterious people follow other people – but the spy stuff turns out to be nonsense, not even real. The real stuff is elsewhere, in liposuction and divorce papers. What shapes the plot isn’t espionage but sexual desire and frustration. There’s a gun (we’re told this twice) which hasn’t gone off in 20 years of service, and of course we know this gun will be fired in the third act – it’s the rules! – and somehow resolve the plot. But the shot, when it comes, resolves nothing and creates nothing. It’s irrelevant, just a waste of a life.
Not everyone will get (or enjoy) what the Coens are going for. For some it’ll just seem pointless, a film about nothing. But the Bros are clearly having fun subverting Hollywood convention (it’s a telling irony when Linda says she’s not exactly the Hollywood type), and there’s lots of laughs along the way – in Clooney as a sex-addict with a short attention span (he often admires people’s flooring), Pitt as a loveable idiot who hates wearing suits and squints his eyes to look more menacing, in little throwaways like a rom-com called “Coming Up Daisy” or a series of children’s books starring Oliver the Cat (we glimpse crates full of remaindered copies, sporting titles like “Yea and Nay for Oliver”). The Coens also have a special genius for casting small parts, and the reactions of the cosmetic surgeon in an early scene – played by a bit-part actor named Jeffrey DeMunn – trying to look interested in Linda’s ramblings while obviously wanting to move on, are almost worth the price of admission in themselves.
Burn After Reading starts with a God’s-eye shot – actually a Google Earth shot (is there a difference nowadays?), zooming down to the corridors of power – just like WALL-E’s exiled humans also gaze down on their former home. Both films work so well because they’re not cheap, not obvious, not clichéd, but also because of what they are: wry human parables, giving the impression of master filmmakers looking down at their creations like benign ringmasters. They’re like the gently baffled CIA chief in Burn, shaking his head at the strangeness of people and giving his assistant these instructions: “Keep an eye on everyone. See what they do.”
