Sylvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville (2003)

Your Humble Commentator wants to talk about something fairly peripheral to tonight’s film, but the gist will be that you want to watch one of Sylvain Chomet’s films in a particular way, and it may be slightly different from how you expect to be watching The Triplets of Belleville. Let’s begin with a little story.

This summer I took daughter #3 to see Disney’s Tangled at the Riverview Theater. A impressive show, Tangled provides the usual well-drawn storybook characters – repressed but plucky heroine, roguish but vulnerable hero, cute animal sidekick (a chameleon), exasperated animal sidekick (Flynn’s horse), and a witchy villain. And the plot moves along with deftly handled comic and tragic turns. The laughs come easily and so do tears. Watching Tangled, one is reminded why Disney has been the best at providing animated features since Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937; honorary Oscar for innovation in 1939). I walked out of the theater thinking, “it’s hard to make an animated feature more polished than that.”

And I drove home, dropped off daughter #3 and picked up daughter #1, and drove back to the Riverview to see Sylvain Chomet’s most recent animated feature, The Illusionist (2010). In it, a down-on-his-luck vaudeville prestidigitator travels around Europe performing in run-down theaters to nearly non-existent crowds. In one inn, he meets and befriends a waifish girl, who decides to travel with him to the big city where he is trying to survive on what engagements he can scare up. They live together, she explores the big city, dreams about a better life, finds it, and that’s about it. It may not seem like much, but it is an undeniably beautiful film. I found myself as impressed by what it didn’t do as by what it did. And I found myself comparing the two films, struck by how different they were, and how much that revealed about what our culture has come to expect of the animated feature film.

For one, where Tangled was polished, The Illusionist was rough. One feels free to follow where it leads, to peer into its nooks and crannies, to ponder its suggestions. Nathan Greno and Byron Howard’s film (the Disney film) leads you to clear, familiar places. It’s hard to watch Tangled and not see reflections of earlier Disney movies, subtly shifted to give the impression of newness. Likewise, the Disney film controls your emotions, giving you big laugh gags followed by tear-jerking melodrama (the hero dies! after sacrificing first his selfishness, then himself for the heroine! then – get another handkerchief – he comes back to life!). Chomet paints a more muted, bittersweet picture – you may chuckle but at moments that are slightly disturbing, and you may be disturbed at moments that are darkly funny. But what emerges from the Chomet experience is a sense that you’ve encountered a true portrait of what life is like. And that it has been presented to you with a simple charm, like a small gift hand-wrapped in yesterday’s giftwrap.

Yes, Disney’s Tangled is presenting a fairytale, not at all the same thing. We want romance, intrepid heroes overcoming adversity, and neat conclusions from those movies. And Disney gives that to us with panache and professionalism. That’s expected.

From Chomet, though, Your Humble Commentator wants you to relish the unexpected, the magic of depicting human life in all its quirkiness. The Triplets of Belleville has an awkward narrative, not easy to follow at first. But the story in not the priority. Watch the characters. Watch the magic. Watch the life.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1993)

The Truman Show is that rare triumph of family filmmaking that introduces its viewers to something bigger than children’s movies. It is made with perfect Hollywood ease, an easy-to-follow plot, and somewhat exaggerated acting. Still, that it pushes its viewer to think is undeniable.

I remember watching the film in elementary school and having a discussion about it afterward. Up until then, my movie-watching had consisted mostly of cartoons and musicals, repeated about ten times each thanks to the wonder of VHS. It was then that I discovered a movie that genuinely gripped and confused me, with a shocking twist two-thirds of the way through. Even more shocking than the twist of plotline was the presence of anything unpredictable at all in a storyline.

The initial appeal has faded, but I’ve watched Peter Weir’s The Truman Show several times since and I keep finding new questions. What does Truman tell us about human consciousness? How does the rubber idiot of Dumb and Dumber transform into a transfixing, thoughtful actor? (This is a question that comes up again in Jim Carrey’s best movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.) Is the movie responsible for those people who schizophrenically believed that they were in a television show – dubbed “Truman Syndrome” by the Institute of Psychiatry in London?

Still, the biggest question is: How did Weir know? Just a decade into the future, Americans are fascinated by televised private lives, from Octomom to Jersey Shore. Not since Network has a movie so accurately predicted the future of popular culture.

Noah Shavit-Lonstein
Film Club

The Evolution of Jim Carrey, Actor

It’s worth considering Noah’s question regarding Jim Carrey’s transformation from elastic clown to amiable naif in his career. He approaches his early movies, driven by a kind of manic hyperactivity, as if his goal were to become a Tex Avery cartoon character (which he pretty much does in Chuck Russell’s The Mask). But in The Truman Show and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which Film Club will screen in February), he’s more human, more a part of the film, more consistently someone to whom life-changing events happen, and, in the end, more watchable.

It’s also worth noting that Carrey is not the first late-night sketch comedian to make this transition. Watch Bill Murray mug and smirk his way through early films like Stripes, Ghostbusters, Meatballs, and Caddyshack, then note the mellower, wryer, more bittersweet characters that he plays in Rushmore or Lost in Translation. Will Ferrell, too, relied on his ironic clueless, self-absorbed jerk act through movies like Anchorman and Talladega Nights, but turned to a more serious, three-dimensional role in Stranger Than Fiction. Heck, even Adam Sandler, after a number of screechy steroidal arrested-adolescence films like Happy Gilmore and Billy Madison (and Little Nicky, which we’d rather scrub our eyeballs with cleanser on a wire toothbrush than have to watch again), tried to move from the look-at-me medium of feature length sketch comedy to true movie acting in Spanglish. Not successfully, mind you, but he tried.

What we learn, perhaps, is that while "Saturday Night Live" and "MADtv" and "In Living Color," post-prime time sketch comedy series, may boost an actor to popularity (especially if the opportunistic comedian comes up with a memorable catch-phrase), it’s still a long way to serious acting. In fact, said comedian may be hampered by the kind of characters one develops in those kind of shows – they tend to be one-dimensional, built on a idiosyncratic characteristic, and a bit improvisational. As you watch Truman, take note of Carrey’s ability to blend himself into the texture of the film and to use his usually plastic face more subtly, showing Truman’s struggle with confusion, alienation, and adversity. Compared to Fire Marshall Bill, he’s almost a different species.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser