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GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S PINOCCHIO

Producers: Guillermo del Toro, Lisa Henson; Gary Ungar, Alex Bulkley and Corey Campodonico   Directors: Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson   Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro and Patrick McHale   Cast: Ewan McGregor, David Bradley, Gregory Mann, Christoph Waltz, Tilda Swinton, Ron Perlman, Finn Wolfhard, Cate Blanchett, Burn Gorman, John Turturro and Tim Blake Nelson   Distributor: Netflix

Grade: A-

The possessive in the title is fair warning that this new film of Carlo Collodi’s 1883 fable about the puppet that comes to life reflects the sensibility of its co-writer/co-director.  But after Robert Zemeckis’ blandly anonymous retelling of the story for Disney+ a few months ago, that’s a blessing.  While Zemeckis did little but clone the famous 1940 animated film, del Toro attempts something far more adventurous—to meld Collodi’s dark vision with his own perspectives and—shall we say it?–obsessions.  The result is a “Pinocchio” that’s a copy of nothing—neither the original nor any previous version of it—but a brilliant, highly personal reimagining of its themes.  Even the slightly unfinished feel of its gorgeous stop-motion animation adds to the unique impression it leaves.

The outline of the tale is the familiar one.  Woodcarver Geppetto (voiced by David Bradley) fashions a puppet that’s brought to life.  Pinocchio, as he’s called, goes through a series of adventures in which he learns lessons about life, death, obedience, and truth-telling.  His goal is to become a “real boy.”

No screen retelling has been been completely faithful to Collodi, and del Toro’s is no exception; in fact his alterations, omissions and additions are more pronounced than one encounters in others.  But it does reflect the original in that though the film doesn’t lack for moments of geniality, overall it’s far darker than previous takes on the tale.

That’s evident from the shifting of the narrative to the early twentieth century, and to a pervasive sense of loss.  Things begin with a sweet prologue in which Geppetto and his ten-year old son Carlo (Gregory Mann) enjoy an idyllic life together in their small village, until the boy is killed during World War I by a stray bomb, dropped from a plane on the parish church where he and his father are working on an imposing crucifix to stand behind the altar.  Heartbroken, Geppetto buries Carlo beside a perfect pinecone the boy had found, which grows into the tree beside which he sits constantly in a drunken stupor.

This is where the cricket enters the story—not Disney’s chipper Jiminy, but Sebastian J. (Ewan McGregor), a well-travelled litterateur who takes up residence in the tree to write his memoirs; he looks rather like something out of “Mimic” rather than a cartoonish figure, and gets squashed repeatedly (as he is in Collodi).  When Geppetto cuts down the tree to carve a puppet to replace Carlo, Sebastian travels with him back to his woodshop. 

But Geppetto leaves the puppet unfinished, which explains why, when Pinocchio is brought to life by the luminous Wood Sprite (Tilda Swinton), he’s a gnarly, rough-hewn, stick-like thing that terrifies the villagers when he enters their church.  (There’s a remarkable moment when Pinocchio adopts the pose of the crucified Christ, only one instance in which del Toro uses Christian religious iconography, and then asks why the congregants revere one wooden figure while hating another. Indeed, Pinocchio will himself be crucified before the film is over.)  And when his nose grows whenever he lies, Pinocchio sprouts what amounts to a branch, with leaves attached to the twigs.

By this time, Italy has turned to fascism—for modern viewers, a more accessible form of brutal administrative authoritarianism than the corrupt nineteenth-century Italian state Collodi portrayed—and the town Podestà (Ron Perlman) demands that the creature go to school and become a good servant to Mussolini.  But Pinocchio shirks study and falls in with sleazy Count Volpe (Christoph Waltz) and his monkey minion Spazzatura (Cate Blanchett), who force him into starring in their puppet act by threatening Geppetto.  When Pinocchio rebels by insulting Il Duce during a command performance, he’s shot for his trouble.

Nonetheless he is compelled to join Mussolini’s youth brigade alongside the Podestà’s son Candlewick (Finn Wolfhard).  That results from the fact that, as explained by the Wood Sprite’s sister Death (also Swinton), a sphinxlike figure in the underworld, he cannot die permanently: after each “death” he will be brought to the underworld in a casket carried by four gruff poker-playing rabbits (Tim Blake Nelson)—only to be returned to life after a brief time with her.  And in befriending the puppet against his father’s demands, Candlewick learns that sometimes disobedience can be a positive virtue, del Toro’s telling thus turning the usual message on its head.

The big finale, of course, is the episode in which Geppetto and Sebastian are trapped in a giant dogfish while searching for Pinocchio, but it takes an especially imaginative twist involving the upending of another traditional message—sometimes lying can be a good thing!—and multiple acts of self-sacrifice.  Even what it means to be a “real boy” is reconsidered here.  Rest assured that despite its darker-than-usual aspects, del Toro’s Pinocchio ends in sentiment with an injunction to be oneself.

The film has been lovingly made, and in technical terms it’s outstanding—besides the superior animation supervised by Brian Leif Hansen and visual effects by Jeffrey Schaper and Aaron Weintraub, its visuals boast exceptional work from production designers Guy Davis and Curt Enderle, art director Robert DeSue, and cinematographer Frank Passingham, all seamlessly edited together by Ken Schretzmann and Holly Klein.  In addition there’s a typically engaging underscore by the always inventive Alexandre Desplat, who also supplies the melodies for a series of songs with lyrics by del Toro, Roeben Katz and Patrick Hale. These aren’t numbers of the big, splashy, repetitive sort that afflict most musicals on stage and screen nowadays, but simple tunes of the kind that Broadway composers used to turn out—charming rather than bombastic.

They’re one more element in a version of “Pinocchio” that’s very different from Collodi’s—and Disney’s, and everyone else’s—and reflecting the personality and creative energy of an idiosyncratic filmmaker at the height of his powers (and, happily, able to attract financing for his projects).  Parents may have to explain some of its plot points to their children (who, after all, might not know who Il Duce was), and may in fact enjoy it more than their offspring do; but it’s an enchanting feast for all.    

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SPOILER ALERT

Producers: Jim Parsons, Todd Spiewak, Allison Mo Massey, Michael Showalter and Jordana Mollick   Director: Michael Showalter    Screenplay: David Marshall Grant and Dan Savage   Cast: Jim Parsons, Ben Aldridge, Nikki M. James, Sally Field, Bill Irwin, Jeffery Self, Antoni Porowski, David Marshall Grant, Josh Pais, Brody Caines, Tara Summers, Sadie Scott and Shunori Ramanathan   Distributor: Focus Features

Grade: C

Emulating Alfred Hitchcock’s self-professed habit of returning to the tried and true when one of his films failed to connect with the audience, Michael Showalter, after the disappointing reception of both the criminally undervalued “The Eyes of Tammy Faye” and “The Lovebirds,” revisits the genre that brought him his greatest success—the rom-com weepie.  But this adaptation of Michael Ausiello’s 2017 memoir (whose subtitle “The Hero Dies” it jettisons) about his relationship with photographer Kit Cowan fails to recapture the spark of Showalter’s previous exercise in tragic-end romance, 2017’s “The Big Sick,” though in that case the tragedy was ultimately avoided.

In this instance the couple is gay.  Jim Parsons stars as Ausiello, who as a staff writer for TV Guide met handsome Cowan (Ben Aldridge) in a bar in 2001.  The two instantly clicked despite their different personalities, and eventually moved in together.  There were rough patches that required couples counseling, and they eventually separated amicably, but when Cowan was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer, Ausiello became his primary support and caregiver until his death. 

That, in a nutshell, is the film’s plot. But as directed by Showalter and edited by Peter Teschner, it’s played out in a fashion that never seems real in either its initial coupling section or its ultimate melancholy one, although the story itself is.  Despite game efforts from Parsons and Aldridge, the movie doesn’t convince us of the instant attraction between Michael, the Smurf-collecting uptight nebbish whose frame of reference comes almost entirely from watching television, and hunky Kit, a well-muscled promiscuous guy who’s nonetheless still in the closet insofar as his parents Marilyn and Bob (Sally Field and Bill Irwin) are concerned.  Nor does it chart the development and deterioration of their relationship with particular insight, preferring instead to tick off a montage of “over the years” Christmas cards that are meant to suffice apart from a tiff over Michael’s suspicion that Kit is cheating on him with office mate Sebastian (Antoni Porowski)—a thread reintroduced awkwardly in the last reel—along with a montage of their animated complaints to a therapist (David Marshall Grant).  And when the film reaches the final act involving Kit’s succumbing to a sudden onset of terminal, fast-spreading cancer, it fails to achieve the emotional force it’s striving for, opting instead to wrench us from the dying man’s final breath to an ill-conceived imaginary sequence that falls flat.

The weaknesses are exacerbated by dialogue that never rings true, generally clunky and surprisingly flat when it tries for quippy humor.  And though Michael, who begins the story with narration, assures us that he’s going to stop talking, he never does, yammering on through the close; you might think of the film as an illustrated audiobook.  This is one instance when a technique that’s generally deplorable—pulling away from a conversation so that we observe it silently from afar rather than hearing the words, as in the scene where Kit finally tells his parents of his condition—is actually welcome.

Even more damaging is a misguided device that periodically interrupts the action explaining Michael’s special horror over Kit’s condition by portraying the loss of his mother to cancer in the form of scenes from a bad eighties sitcom in which, as a self-described FFK (Former Fat Kid) played by Brody Caines, he witnesses his mom (Tara Summers) learning of her diagnosis.  The interjections would be disruptive under any circumstances, but they’re also so poorly done as to be embarrassing.

Neither does the film use its cast to best advantage.  Parsons brings the skills honed on network sitcoms considerably better than the fabricated one included here to the mix, but his dramatic impulses feel false, especially since Showalter exhibits a penchant for oppressive close-ups, and while Aldridge fills the physical dimensions of his role, he proves overmatched by the demands of his later scenes.  Even Field and Irwin fare poorly.  She’s forced into exaggeration as a woman who, in her seventies, is still devoted to participating in triathlons; Irwin fares better as her halting, complaining, nervously halting spouse.  A few others have moments: Sadie Scott as Kit’s amusingly laconic roommate, Jeffrey Self as Michael’s extrovert friend Nick, and Nikki M. James as their mutual pal Nina.  Visually the film has a TV sitcom look—Sara K. White’s production design and Claire Parkinson’s costumes are unremarkable, as is Brian Burgoyne’s cinematography, though matters spark somewhat in outdoor sequences at Ocean Beach.  Brian H. Kim’s score falls back on rather predictable effects.              

“Spoiler Alert” tells a story that, while formulaic, can’t help but be touching.  But while it may succeed in wringing a few tears from you, in retrospect you probably won’t feel they’ve been earned.