THE BOOK OF LIFE

We could overlook, as many critics explicitly said they did, the impersonal narrative of The Book of Life had it at least stayed true to its avowed purpose, a celebration of the Day of the Dead and its meaning to Mexicans. But the holiday and what it stands for remains only a backdrop for most of the film until it becomes, at most, a Deus ex machine device to save the day. What could have been an overdue tribute to the festivities of a country the movie lovingly refers to as the center of the universe, becomes an interesting missed opportunity.

            An indication of the missteps to come arrives early in the film when a school bus drops a band of rowdy children in front of an unnamed museum. Being cartoons, they are, of course, abstract caricatures of contemporary tweens but are, by a comparison that is about to become obvious, recognizable as humans. It is set to create a contrast for the movie’s further plight into cartoon abstraction in the story within the story (about two childhood amigos who compete for the love of the same señorita in the old town of San Angel) where all of the characters are wooden puppets, making the children the proxies to our world. In itself, that framework makes sense because the story is told by the mesmerizing tour guide (Christina Applegate) with the use of carved wood figures representing the players. Ultimately, however, the difference between the world of the children (the “real” world) and that of the fable contained within is only superficial.

            The movie sets up for a dimensional distance between the two worlds through the means of classic fantasy devices. The children are led by the unorthodox tour guide (the magical nanny who knows how to reach out to troublesome kids) not through the museum’s main entrance but, rather, through a secret entrance into a labyrinth few others have seen where the magic of Mexico’s holiday comes to life. The story that will unfold within this framework promises to be filled with charm, folk magic, and legend. True, it takes place in a real country in the real world (albeit in a fantastical town shaped like a guitar), but it’s not the Mexico we recognize. This is an alternate land of spirits, mystic creatures, and afterlives. 

            And then, once we delve into this stylized Mexico and its traditional folk music and colors, the film assaults us with an array of contemporary pop songs that have little, if anything, to do with the land. This may sound trivial, but it’s a betrayal of the film’s promised intention. If the spell of San Angel derives from its abstraction from the real world, why drown it with references to modern trends?

            Conversely, the main point of abstraction (the wooden husks of the characters), while reasonable in principle, eventually diminishes whatever impact was possible from the story. It’s hard to feel much for what is, after all, a marionette. This is especially true when Manolo (Diego Luna), the docile guitar player who dreams of winning the hand of Maria (Zoë Saldana) by following a different path than his family of matadors, finally enters the bullring. We are asked not only to fear for a puppet but also to take the beast he battles, a gadget made of wood and steal, seriously.

            As a tribute to Mexican culture, The Book of Life came from trusted sources. Director Jorge Gutierrez has a long history of animating his country’s rich heritage for children (most notably Nickelodeon’s El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera) and here, for his first big screen venture, got backing from, among others, none other than Guillermo del Toro.

            Gutierrez had long been planning the film and seemingly struck gold when he landed a deal with DreamWorks in 2007, but this was not to be. Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted one thing and Gutierrez another and so they parted ways. Gutierrez shopped his project around for some time after.

            “We pitched it everywhere, and the reaction was, 'Day of the Dead for children? Are you guys crazy?,” he recalled. “Most people thought it was about zombies.”

 His savior came in early 2012 in the form of a then little known Dallas based animation company called Reel FX with Fox Animation Studios offering to distribute the film. It was shortly after that del Toro was brought in.

            Del Toro soon took the picture and, tellingly, fell in love with the premise of the film. “I have admired Jorge’s work for a long time,” he said. “He has a unique aesthetic and sense of humor. Day of the Dead [as the film was still being called in early 2012, before it was changed to avoid conflict with a similarly themed Pixar movie under production] offers a perfect opportunity for his sensibilities to shine. This is a colorful, vibrant, vital fable that utilizes the animation medium in an incredible way. The object of the tale is not only to talk about life but to dazzle us – jolt us- into living to the fullest. To join Reel FX, Cary Granat and Jorge in this adventure is a privilege and a joy.”

            Judging by later interviews, it seems as if Gutierrez had both his heart and head in the right place.

            “I never saw Mexicans or Latinos up on the screen, so I was just happy when we would show up,” he told the LA Times.  “But then I would go, well, that's not what we are. I started questioning the portrayal of the culture. When I got older I said, 'I want to play with that. I want to make fun of how we're perceived. I want to turn that around.”

            A lot of that national spirit is evident in The Book of Life but a revealing statement by Gutierrez is indicative of where it went wrong.
            “All my favorite albums, all my favorite books and films, they are all personal stories that take place in a very specific culture but that are universal,” he said to the Hollywood Reporter. “So I wanted to make something that happened in my family but make it for the world.”

            It’s a commendable undertaking in itself, but in The Book of Life it has the effect of draining the movie’s cultural soul.

            That said there are many smart innovations in The Book of Life worthy of praise. Most of the toon creations are more profound than the unimaginative love triangle and themes (stand up to your fears, follow your own path, etc.) suggest. Joaquin (Channing Tatum), Manolo’s cheeseball rival for Maria’s love, is a boastful decorated warrior who nonetheless finds room in his heart to respect his childhood chum. Maria is, as to be expected, designed as a role model for young women and puts both men in their place when she becomes a mere prize in their battle but is also the most endearing heroine in a recent animated film, striking a perfect balance in her martial arts expertise and kind heart. No side character, from the comically incompetent guards to the bumbling bandits that terrorize the town, are wasted. Even the gods watching over the town are written in terms broader than good and evil. La Muerte (Kate del Castillo), ruler of the jovial Land of the Remembered, is kind enough to believe humanity deserves to be trusted while her husband, the slimy Xibalba (Ron Perlman in one of his most unrecognizable vocal efforts) is a dour cynic watching over the living in disdain. Obviously inspired by Disney’s take on Hades in Hercules, he has the acid humor of his hand-drawn counterpart but neither his plan nor intention are irredeemably evil. He simply wants a turn at ruling the happier land and so engages in a bit of a wager with his unworldly wife. He doesn’t play fair, but the fate of humanity is never at stake and his quarrels with La Muerte over the villagers are not dissimilar to those of parents arguing over their children. The best of these supreme beings is Ice Cube’s Candle Maker, a big jolly bearded spirit made entirely of wax and clouds, a composition computer animation captures terrifically. As is often the case, the blandest character is the one we are supposed to root for. Manolo is little more than a pure soul with a gift for song. Saints are so boring.

            There were no better people to make The Book of Life than Jorge Gutierrez and Guillermo del Toro. By all accounts, in the development stages of The Book of Life they knew what they were doing. At some point before the end of production they forgot what they set out to honor.

GONE GIRL

Gone Girl is an unusually wrenching film, even for David Fincher, and a hard specimen to classify. What starts out as a psychological thriller (did an unhappy husband kill his wife and then report her missing to throw the police off track?) turns into a mind game, shifting gears about half-way through. Had this been simply a case study of a doomed marriage spiraling into darkness the game change would have been a weakness and a stronger case could be made for the big revelation to be interpreted as a vilification of women. However, when it turns the table, Gone Girl creates a new villain; the media. Both the media and the public that feeds it take over the role of monsters so thoroughly in the movie that the direction of the tragedy between Nick and Amy Dunne (Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike), if there even was one, is beside the point.

This, it should be said, it truer of the film than the book. In the book, Gillian Flynn devotes at least as much time to the mechanisms of Nick and Amy’s relationship and to what extent love existed between them. In their dynamics, love, at least in the common sense, is not only unnecessary but may also be misguided. It’s a marriage built on conditions between two people who have reason to fear each other and, as Amy argues in the novel, it works all the more secure for it. When she wrote the screenplay, Flynn pushed Amy’s relationship ideology to the peripheral side and centered the script to the ills of the media. For the purposes of the film this was a smart choice, making for a concise, focused, and terse adaptation.

In the movie, almost every move the Dunnes make is motivated by a foreknowledge of the media and concern for public perception. That leads to the ultimate horror of the story. What they actually do to each other is, to use one of Amy’s choice terms, background noise. They act first and foremost as fodder for TV.

“In today’s media landscape every human emotion is packaged for someone else to consume, whether it’s social media or a true-crime TV show,” Flynn said. “People in the public eye are all taking turns packaging themselves for consumption by others or being packaged by others. We can’t control how we’re being viewed or how people perceive us.Fact is, in this era of the 24-hour news cycle, we’re consuming other people’s tragedies as entertainment.”

At first there is nothing inherently strange about Nick and Amy. They meet like a lot of couples, among hip circles at a New York bar, marry, and then move to a small Missouri town to care for Nick’s mother in her final years. This is when and where the tension seems to begin. There were earlier signs of disaccord, but the nearby presence of Nick’s family seems to distance Amy. Things get worse when Nick’s habit of spending continues after his lay-off and Amy allows her parents to take from her trust fund. These quarrels are common to many married couples but Nick’s image seems to get uglier fast upon their move to the suburbs and he shuts his wife off emotionally, even turning violent when she pleads to have a baby.   

But Fincher is pulling the carpet out beneath us and in time will incriminate us with the same locals who bought Amy’s story uncritically. Everything we know of their marriage comes from Amy’s diary, told in flashback. We accept what she tells us without ever questioning her reliability as a narrator. There is, Fincher says, no excuse for us buying Amy’s story as easily as the locals who assume Nick murdered his wife. If the media and the movies themselves haven’t given us enough precedent as to the dangers of fast assumptions, Gone Girl gives us plenty.

The first thing to strike us about the flashbacks is the dreamy quality; the heightened music, dark tones, and fake sounding dialogue. Amy (in both voice-over and in person) sounds especially phony, meaning her words have been rehearsed and faked. It is, after all, based on how she recorded her own words in her journal, where she polished her image into the character she wanted the public to see.

Both in and out of the flashbacks those around her speak more naturally, but the scenes set in the present, when Amy is “gone”, seem far closer to the real world. Of course, flashbacks often have dreamy feels as memory is, indeed, a foggy thing but, in Gone Girl, they are deliberately staged that way by their narrator and so the haziness of recollection has little to do with the matter.

Only in the intervals between the flashbacks does a different picture of Nick and Amy begin to form. Amy had at least two previous turbulent relationships with men and one ended in a near suicide for her lover. Suggesting there are at least other sides to her story.

Nick, likewise, doesn’t seem to be quite the monster Amy paints him as. He acts genuinely concerned about his wife and, if anything, he seems a bit of a sap. Still, we follow what Amy’s diary tells us until the movie reveals the truth about both Amy and her diary, when we tend to feel more relieved than unsurprised.

Fincher and Flynn thrust it on us as “see, don’t jump to conclusion” twist. Had Nick been executed for Amy’s murder (unlikely, anyhow, as the officer investigating the case reminds us how difficult it is to get a conviction without a body) we are just as guilty as the locals suckered in by Amy and her use of the media.

Of course, David Fincher is not one to offer easy answers. If movies and the media itself are reason to take Amy’s account with a grain of salt, Fincher also points to a number of reason in favor of her credibility. The strongest case for Amy’s story is that her account of her relationship with Desi, the suicidal millionaire played by Neil Patrick Harris, is proven at least partially true when she reconnects with him after her plan is thwarted. Everything we learn about Desi is consistent with Amy’s description; mostly

his emotional imbalance and need to control.  But this disturbing vibe comes not from Harris’s performance in the movie itself but, of all places, evocations of his performance in A Very Harold & Kumar 3D Christmas, where he spoofed his own public image while also using women’s vulnerability, feigning empathy with them, to gain control of their actions. If Harold & Kumar presented the darkest depths of his persona, Gone Girl uses it as a very bleak glimpse into Amy’s past and a possible motive for his distrust of men.

            A lot of what Amy says about Nick could also well be true. He is bound to fits of rage (he smashes a glass when a police interrogation cuts too deep) and has not been entirely honest with his own family about his infidelity. The truth, finally, is somewhere in the middle. That is Fincher’s ultimate stance. We shouldn’t dismiss Amy’s story entirely. Even after the half-way point when its climax is revealed to have been staged.

            If we ever lost sympathy for Nick, after the big reveal we want Amy to fail. She almost does when she underestimates a couple she takes into her confidence, but whenever her plan begins to crumble she is always one step ahead because she knows the media so well. When her original plan fails, she moves to plan B which, because the viewing public likes happy endings, succeeds (is there a suggestion that television audiences dictate news story outcomes?) Amy’s triumph, however, is not just a result of her own savviness but also of Nick’s and that is the final sad irony. Through the whole ordeal, Nick has learned enough about the media and what its audience wants to know his options are predetermined. He knows who his wife is, what she’s doing, and how the public will react, and so he knows his chance for getting out is becoming smaller, given the influence of the media in making or breaking a person, especially when a baby is involved. Gone Girl is a tragedy about a man who gets to know the media so well only to get trapped by it into a life of misery. He is, finally, as much a sell-out to it as the people who condemned him.

            Stylistically and emotively, Gone Girl is another triumph for David Fincher who can’t seem to make a wrong turn. Yes, the film runs a bit too long but it knows how to sprawl itself. The flashbacks, which start coming before we even know what kind of film this is ultimately going to be, offer him the greatest canvas for what he does best; creating suspense within ordinary settings and drab infrastructure. He likely saw a great opportunity in Flynn’s third novel and joined the wagon after 20^th-Century-Fox purchased the rights to the novel in the summer of 2012 for $1.5 million, with $500,00 going to Flynn for writing the screenplay. Fincher has still not signed on, however, by the time Fincher submitted the first draft in December. The hard part for Flynn was largely done, though she thought it a positive experience.

            “It was thrilling to see it all come together,” she said. “As someone who has covered movies for many years, I know that most of the time it doesn’t turn out so well for the original author. What was different this time around was that I had a great director who really liked the book and didn’t want to turn it into something other than what it already was.”

            From the start, Fincher and Flynn worked well together and the finished product has the polished feel of a great minds working in perfect harmony.

            “David Fincher liked the same things in the book that I liked. He wanted a faithful screen adaptation, not a whole new thing,” Flynn added.

            When the book started making waves in Hollywood (before even hitting shelves), Fincher was thought of as the best, if only, director capable of bringing the psychological depths of the work to the surface. Even Flynn came to realize that her novel would not easily lend itself to film.

            “Of course once I got into it I realized I was dealing with some complicated ideas,” she said. “It’s an internal story, centering on the characters’ thoughts. There’s lots of jumping back and forth in time. The diary stuff. And the plotting is very dense. So I knew from the beginning it wasn’t going to be easy. I knew I would have to concentrate on pacing and rearranging the order of some scenes. And with this story, tone is hugely important. It’s a thriller but with some dark humor — deep and dark.”

            As well as Flynn and Fincher worked together, it is unlikely that either one imagined how much the cast would bring to understanding of the book, even from critically shunned names like Tyler Perry as an attorney with an ability to play the media at its own game and come out ahead.

            “I’ve said all along that Amy is the showy role, but that the actor playing Nick has to be simply great,” Flynn said. “If he doesn’t work, the movie doesn’t work. And the great thing about Ben’s performance is that he makes you care even when you’re thinking he might be a murderer. You want to hang out with him and tell him it’s going to be OK … but you also want to punch him in the mouth. And Rosamund really blooms in her role. She gets to show so many emotions and sides to a human being. She was constantly asking me about Amy’s background, her friends, what kind of party she would enjoy. She had a copy of the book filled with notes.”

            Appropriately so for such a unique film, Gone Girl is one of the very few times in Hollywood (especially when the author of the original work was directly involved) that many cooks from many different circles created something wonderful, in this case the most atmospheric and provocative film of 2014. The media is a frequent and easy target for its own spawn, the film industry, but few movies have had the nerve to make their audience complicit in its corruption. Gone Girl’s makes its most powerful statement by making us gawkers into a personal tragedy before we even understand it, much like the locals in the film we think we are above.

THE BOXTROLLS

The Boxtrolls is a movie of such strong virtues that it’s tempting to overlook its shortcomings. Unfortunately, they are there, spoiling the wonder of classic dark fantasy (Alan Snow’s Here Be Monsters! to be exact).

To be optimistic, there is more to admire than regret here. As always, LAIKA’s puppets become as real and move as fluidly as any cartoon, there is even a nifty philosophical gag about the craft for those who sit to the end of the credits (which are fun hand-drawn gags in themselves). Each character is a lively creation. Like Walt Disney first did for his seven dwarfs for Snow White, each of the playful trolls is a distinct invention, named after the type of box it uses for its shell. There’s Wheels, Oil Can, Shoe, and Fish (Dee Bradley Baker), who is a sort of father figure. To who?  Why to the human baby they took from the human world above and raised as their own in their secret cavern under the streets of the town.

They took in this “Trubshaw Baby” (as he became known after his kidnapping) as one of their one and named him after the egg carton he wears over his shirt for reasons the movie explains in due time, but it’s clear from the start that the world above is a nasty place to be. The elite ruler, Lord Portley-Rind (Jared Harris) reigns from a castle high above a mountain-tip overlooking the village. Both the ladder to and the aspiration of royalty in Cheesebridge is to be a good judge of cheese, a title distinguished by a coveted white top hat.

This is an even stronger throwback to Great Britain’s class system than 2005’s Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The baddies, a gang of boxtroll exterminators, are marked by their tattered red hats. They are a dirty mean bunch that aspires to bigger things. Though the movie makes the point that, “Cheese, boxes, hats, are not what make you. You make you,” the rest of Cheesebridge seems to scorn both the trolls and the exterminators, and that’s the irony. Snatcher (Ben Kingsley) and his men live in a stark factory much like the cavern of the creatures they chase.

Oh, but The Boxtrolls takes plenty of jabs at the upper-class as well. As Eggs (Isaac Hempstead-Wright) makes his way to the grand ball to warn the town of Snatcher’s evil plan, the movie takes every opportunity to treat the pompous society with ridicule and by the time he is humiliated and cast away from the castle Eggs vows never to be seen amongst the “real monsters” again. Indeed, Lord Portley-Rind cares more about his hat and cheeses than Winnie (Elle Fanning), his rebellious daughter, in contrast to the strong sense of family among the troll community and their adopted son.

There is a sort of rusty old charm to stop-motion animation that CGI, for all of its razzle-dazzle, can’t capture. Each character seems to exist of real matter and occupy real space as, indeed, a puppet does. No matter how grotesque (a troll, a grimy exterminator, etc.), each being or object here is crafted with such delicate care, they appeal to multiple senses. We can feel and therefore crave the cheese the judges hold, we can feel the sensory appeal of the prestigious hats when they are described as “white and fluffy” and feel the desire to hold one. Even the bugs that are fodder for the trolls look good enough to grab.

After animators in the United States abandoned it for other techniques, Great Britain took to stop-motion animation and did wonderful things with it, especially Cosgrove Hall’s adaptation of The Wind in the Willows. The charm never wore off in England and found a new cast in Chicken Run and Wallace & Gromit. Though an American production, The Boxtrolls is a healthy reminder of the primal beauty offered in The Wind in the Willows (Snatcher’s most wicked henchman, Mr. Gristle, even bares and unflattering resemblance to Mr. Toad while Mr. Pickles, his most eager to redeem, could not look more like Rat when sporting his fake whiskers).

The Boxtrolls brings back the old pleasantry of a vanishing art form and is the perfect way to bring a storybook to life. But the whimsy is cut short by hurried writing, which turns out to be a costlier mistake here than usual.

The first mistake of directors Anthony Stacchi and Graham Annable was opening the film with the trolls’ presence already established in Cheesebridge, where they have become as a sight as pigeons and rats. It would have been nice to have witnessed the surprise and panic stirred by their arrival. What did the villagers think when these little green men started popping out from under the streets? Was there fear or amazement? How did the hostility first start? The film foregoes all of that and begins at a point when all the shock and awe has passed and the trolls may as well be everyday vermin. They are no longer so much feared, but loathed. Besides the mystery of what happened to the Trubshaw Baby, there is no longer any mystery about them and this over familiarity with the supernatural may be what disappointed Alonso Duralde who called it, “A charmless misfire.”

Duralde is not being quite fair. The Boxtrolls has a thumping heart and designer’s elegance, but for all its artistic flair and creative inventions, described accurately by LAIKA president Travis Knight as, “a visually dazzling mash-up of gripping detective story, absurdist comedy, and steampunk adventure with a surprisingly wholesome heart. It’s Dickens by way of Monty Python,” The Boxtrolls is surprisingly blasé about its own magic and fantasy. It’s surprising considering LAIKA’s fascination with secret worlds. Coraline, the studio’s best film, introduced a parallel world just a wall away from a mundane existence, with obvious signs that something terrible was hidden behind its pleasures. ParaNorman was considerably less meticulous in developing its chills, in part because the little boy of the title had the gift of seeing ghosts before the movie began, but it still managed to introduce the spirits in such a level that shocked us along with the child accustomed to seeing them. In The Boxtrolls, the little creatures are treated as just another part of the city. Wondrous as they may be in themselves, we need to see them strike awe in our fellow humans to be convinced of their power.