Get Smart and Kung-Fu Panda (2008)

Most big summer movies are so willfully, overbearingly impersonal that any hint of chemistry at all is sadly noteworthy. Get Smart is a lazy, thrown-together movie but Anne Hathaway and her unexpectedly appealing give-and-take with a loose, funnier than usual Steve Carell lends the laziness the illusion of lackadaisical wit. You don’t walk out of the picture resenting the explosions because the director, Peter Segal, isn’t enough of a filmmaker to build those scenes up, they blow away, and leave you with just Hathaway and Carell, who suggest legitimate possibility as some sort of romantic-screwball team. Get Smart has the savvy to allow Carell an unexpected equality to Hathaway that could possibly strike her gorgeous super-spy as novel. She’s the promise of glamour and sex, of adventure and all the things we resent or envy cheerleaders and actresses for implying and withholding. Carell is the nerd as ironic hero - he’s as misplaced in this movie world as this Hathaway would be in most of our worlds. Carell’s everyday commonality makes him exotic too - to the bad guys and to Hathaway – his solutions baffle their glorified expectations and rules of play. Carell, devoid of outlandishness, must find another way.

It helps that Carell, playing a spy in a not-quite franchise, is a more convincing everyman here than in his more self-conscious roles in The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Dan and Real Life. Carell plays broad, that’s unavoidable, but he allows his Maxwell little asides of melancholy that add up. While Carell’s neediness was irritating in some of his other pictures, it’s surprising and refreshing in a film we have no expectations of. It’s also a credit to the picture’s (barely existent) script that Carell’s brainy, interior nature isn’t mocked or emasculated in the typically jock blood-junky Hollywood action fashion. There’s a wee suggestion of empathy. You like him. And you understand why Hathaway, who’s given a bizarre plastic surgery story to explain her age difference from Carell, would like him as well. Carell sells that cliché of the average guy so clueless he doesn’t know he’s totally out of his dream girl’s league – he treats her like a comrade, a buddy, a princess in camouflage shorts, and he walks away with her.

Get Smart also plays into Hathaway’s strength, that slightness that I had, last week, suggested was a liability. Hathaway is a good sport, her slightness humanizes her beauty and her charm – her charm isn’t dictatorial, like Julia Roberts or Halle Berry. Hathaway is capable of occupying a scene that isn’t devoted to everything that’s gloriously, ineffably her. Hathaway took it too far in The Devil Wears Prada, she was a bore and was upstaged by Emily Blunt, but in Get Smart, a considerably weaker film than Prada, she’s allowed a part so undeniably silly that she just goes with it, without congratulating herself for her sportsmanship. When Julia walked away with Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, I took it as I would the ending of a particularly ghoulish horror picture – an unsettling promise of misery to come. When Hathaway and Carell walked away, I almost started the film over again – they’re a cute couple. Is a good director up to capitalizing on this promise? Probably not, our big directors these days seem to be incapable of escapist fare without obvious 9/11 parables to justify their working in the mainstream sector. Self-loathing in artists has never been so boring. We’ll never get another Thin Man, unless it’s a remake of The Thin Man that doesn’t remotely resemble The Thin Man.

The trend of front-loading animated films with celebrity voices of varying degrees of success is irritating and occasionally racist, but the animated film also sometimes provides the opportunity for an up-tight or stuck actor to rediscover himself. (Tom Hanks’ best work in the last many years is Toy Story and Toy Story 2.) Kung-Fu Panda, possibly the most purely pleasurable action film of the year, stars Jack Black’s voice as Po, a roly-poly panda stuck working for his father in a noodle shop, while dreaming of acceptance into an elite team of ninja animals led by Dustin Hoffman as a little creature I couldn’t quite identify. Hoffman, who’s made a late inning career of warm, funny and relaxed performances in movies that suck, is allowed a vehicle here that gets on his stoned legend’s wavelength. Kung-Fu Panda doesn’t hustle you – it doesn’t run you over with its energy or its importance – it’s a kung-fu animal blowout for children, the hilariously straight-forward title more than appropriate.

It’s also a kung-fu animal blowout with Jack Black’s most restrained performance. Sticking Black in a little room with a microphone has allowed him to cool his jets and riff on the self-loathing that propels him, that revelation of tenderness that marks School of Rock as a career high point. Maybe Black’s finally gaining a sense of control over himself: he was also restrained in his lack of restraint for Ben Stiller in Tropic Thunder this year. Black is normally a physical-verbal tornado, a parody of acting out as compensation for fill in the blank; but, as Po, Black allows us to come to him – he drops the meta – he isn’t a sad, lonely man satirizing how sad, lonely men try to transcend themselves with volume – he’s, as a panda, pared down, relaxed. You can feel Black exhaling – and he lends Po a surprisingly fragile voice, a voice with a beauty normally reserved for those ironically forceful covers that can frequently be heard over the end credits of his films. I almost never buy this self-actualization through ass-kicking stuff, but the ending, a duel between Po and a surprisingly menacing baddie voiced by Ian McShane (he doesn’t dial his viciousness down for the kids) is a feel great moment – a fat boy’s dream of super-heroism. Kung-Fu Panda is a children’s action film that respects children, that embodies what children sometimes dream of as their action figures collide in the grass.

Posted on November 18th, 2008 in Reviews, Action, Comedy, 2008 |

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