The unspoken doctrine of the modern animated kids’ film frowns on any kind of semi-serious character introspection, so it’s already a shock when, not two minutes in Nickelodeon Pictures’ Rango, we stand witness to the eponymous hero engaging with forced desperation to a room of imaginary friends and pausing long enough to ask himself THE question, the Mack Daddy of psychotherapy:
Who am I?
It’s a question Rango struggles with throughout the film and never in the crowd-pleasing sense that Jason Bourne does—it’s not that literal chameleon Rango has forgotten who he is that’s the problem, it’s that he’s almost positive that no one cares who he is, least of all himself. By the time this crisis reaches its apex, and Rango decides to kill himself by slowly walking across an interstate highway, the packed audience of (mostly) under-ten-year olds and their parents I saw the film with began to stir uncomfortably. Can’t blame them, really. You do not give your animated hero an existential crisis (unless you are Pixar), and you certainly don’t have him/her decide that Suicide is Painless in response (which even Pixar wouldn’t dare attempt).
As a kids’ movie, Rango is an abject failure. It’s the only thing the movie is bad at. In terms of sheer creative invention and filmmaking panache, Rango stands well above every major release of 2011. Lest one think that’s faint praise (it has been a very bad movie year), Rango is the only mainstream animated movie to hit the big-screens since Pixar started cranking out feature-length stories that ranks with the best of that venerated studio’s output.
Rango finds success in eschewing convention. It takes to the Wild West for inspiration, which—the recent True Grit’s success notwithstanding—isn’t exactly a lucrative commercial proposition, and then it inspires viewers to be up on their Western Cinema knowledge. On one level, the film is Rango recontexualizing his existence as the lead in a Western epic (the mysterious loner coming to the rescue of a dying prairie town), always aware of the hero’s role and of the conventions guiding his path. On another, it’s a full-length Looney Tunes cartoon, the structure of the film a frame to hang loads of winking references/homages/in-jokes. Some of these nods are overt—a viewer with no prior knowledge of spaghetti westerns and John Wayne movies will probably sense Rango is up to something when these beats hit—though shout-outs to Budd Boetticher, Cat Ballou, Duel in the Sun, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller come faster and with little fanfare.
Some viewers might find the structure a little aimless, but I thought it part of Rango’s charm. This is the rare animated movie that delights more in characters riffing with one another that with frenetic mayhem. Rango’s confrontations with a murderous hawk and a family of redneck moles aside, the heart of this one lies in extended, seemingly-improvised scenes of talking, from Rango embellishing his exploits before a crowd of the inebriated to a campfire scene that gets stranger and funnier the more its participants ramble. It’s a hangout movie, a spiritual successor to The Big Lebowski, in many ways.
Where Rango exceeds that particular modern classic is in visual splendor. The aesthetic imagination can take your breath away; visual consultant and master cinematographer Roger Deakins (True Grit, No Country for Old Men) helps to design a Western landscape more myth than reality, from arid desert plans and red canyons to some of the most stunning Big Sky tableaus put on film. There is always something to marvel at, always something interesting to see.
Credit must also go to director Gore Verbinski, who uses Rango as a palette cleanser after years of toiling for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. If those films were mundane actioners punctuated with surrealist wit, then Rango flips the equation: it feels like Verbinski throwing in every crazy idea he ever had (dream sequences that are equal parts Salvador Dali, Terry Gilliam, and Alejandro Jodorowski; scarecrow-like cactus plants that slither on tentacles to find water; a whole town constructed from common household paraphernalia) and connecting them by the briefest suggestion of plot. Verbinski lets his cast of misfits run wild in all this madness and visually, it’s as if the characters stepped out from a Ralph Steadman drawing. No effort has been made to aesthetically ingratiate anyone with audiences. Pixel for pixel, there is more slime, scales, grit, and texture than “cute”—“cute” cannot thrive in the savagery of the West.
That uncompromising character detail spills into the voice work. Verbinski didn’t hire big stars just so he could put them on the poster; he hired good actors (Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Vincent Kartheiser, Ray Winstone, Bill Nighy, Ned Beatty, the incomparable Stephen Root) to contribute their own idiosyncrasies to their roles. The MVP is Johnny Depp as Rango. After ten years of phoning in quirky shtick, Depp gives a complex and supremely odd vocal performance as a chameleon desperate to reinvent himself. It’s the most engaged and inspired he has been since Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and a welcome return to form for the actor.
With all the riches Rango offers, it does come as a slight disappointment once the more conventional plot elements kick in during the last forty minutes of the film. These are well done (and another gift for movie geeks—the plot comes courtesy of Chinatown, complete with a Big Bad animated and voiced as a near-duplicate of John Huston’s Noah Cross), with moments of absurdity and emotion outclassing anything else released this year; it just isn’t as freewheeling and inventive as the previous hour.
No comments:
Post a Comment