Okay,
so I have this recurring segment on this blog called In Defense,
where I take a second look at movies or TV shows that I feel have
gotten something of a bad rap, and as the name implies, try to mount
my best defense of them. Most of the time, I've seen the movie and
have my defense in mind before writing, while other times I have to
watch the movie again to remember if I actually liked it or not, as
was the case with It's Pat: The Movie. This time around, I decided to
tackle a movie I'd never seen, purely based on the assumption that
its weird dark fantasy style seemed right up my alley. I have now
watched The Nutcracker 3D, and unfortunately, as
much as I wanted to love this movie, and as much as I by all rights
should have given my tastes and tolerance for over-indulgence, I am
at a loss.
From
reading other reviews of this movie, I gather the main complaint
leveled against it is one that I almost always feel is too silly to
even bother with, namely that the material is too dark and twisted
for its younger target audience. As I touched upon in my defense of
Return To Oz, people who think this way about movies underestimate
the capacity of children to handle potentially frightening imagery,
and do so to the ultimate detriment of those children, who if
deprived of the darker side of whimsy will almost certainly grow up
to be the kind of boring people who think kids shouldn't watch darkly
whimsical movies. That I read this argument so many times in
reference to this adaptation of the Nutcracker raised my hackles
enough to leap to its defense even before I had seen it for myself,
and while I still stand by my rejection of this mindset, I find the
film has an entirely different set of problems.
Even
a dark, off kilter reality needs to be established and structured
within a set of rules. These rules can rely on magic and mystery, and
don't necessarily even have to be spelled out explicitly as long as
the events on screen are consistent. When anything is possible and
nothing is set in stone, than nothing matters. The movie begins with
the completely arbitrary inclusion of Albert Einstein as the uncle of
the young female protagonist, who when he's not breaking the fourth
wall in a way that adds nothing but confusion to the affairs,
butchers the Theory of Relativity into a musical ode to solipsism,
setting the stage for what's to come. For example, much of the plot
hinges on the curse placed upon the titular Nutcracker, but there's
no reason why the fact that he's a wooden golem instead of a boy
prince means he can't rule his subjects or that they can't fight back
against their rat oppressors, but for some reason they just let
themselves be oppressed until they see him in the flesh.
But
then, I'm getting ahead of myself. The story revolves around a young
girl who goes on a magical imaginary adventure, implied to be some
sort of dream that may or may not intersect with reality, where her
favorite dolls come to life and ask her to help them save their
secret world from an occupying force of humanoid rats lead by John
Tuturro as the effeminate Andy Warhol-esque Rat King. Her doll
friends consist of the Napoleonic wooden boy, a talking monkey, a big
fat John Wayne Gacy style clown, and a vaguely racist Jamaican
stereotype Little Drummer Boy. Oh, and the Rats are basically Nazis,
deliberately styled after the Gestapo because...I got nothing. Well,
I've got some things, but none of them good.
When
I watch movies on DVD in the comfort of my own home with the intent
to review them, I like to take notes, but with this one, the crazy
nonsense would often go by too fast for me to write it all down. At
the top of my first page, scrawled in large letters about half way
through watching this are the words “So Misguided.” It feels like
an obvious attempt to show off the then still somewhat novel
technology of 3D movies with a fantasy spectacle reminiscent of the
kind of creepy 80's fantasy films I grew up with and still
emphatically love. And yet, its so shallow and thoughtless that it is
as if my weird sensibilities were thought to be so ubiquitous as to
be catered to in the same superficial way that comic book fans are
now, without any understanding of why this sort of material is
appealing, or any interest in doing it justice.
At
one point, as if to hammer home the notion that our main antagonist
is evil, if we didn't pick up on it during the song he sings about
how evil he is, we see that his palace is decorated with wallpaper
consisting of giant blown up images of crying babies. I can't quite
recall if we see this before or after he arbitrarily electrocutes a
shark, but then these are only two of the many random visual touches
that could have made a better movie more fun and interesting, but
without any thing bringing them all together, just comes off as weird
and off putting. This disconcerting feeling is only enhanced by the
songs, taking music we are so used to hearing in instrumental form
and adding lyrics that never seem to fit well with the scene or say
anything important. With everything else going on in this movie, that
John Turturro salsa dancing would be one of the scariest moments is a
testament to how horrifying this all is.
Oh,
that's right, the casting. When Nathan Lane showed up nonsensically
as Albert Einstein, I thought that at least I'd have one charming
performance to get me through this, as he almost never fails to be
affable and amusing, and while he certainly is here, even he couldn't
save this thing. Elle Fanning plays the lead girl, and if I'm not
mistaken, by this point she had already proven many times that she is
so much better than the performance seen here, where her expression
seems to drift off blankly into space as if to acknowledge that she
made a bad choice signing on to this and doesn't want to be in the
movie anymore that I want to be watching it. And as for Turturro, my
God. I wanna say this was miscast, but I honestly don't know how this
character could have been well-cast. He does his best and vamps it up
quite a bit, but the result is just one big ball of wrong that I
simply cannot abide.
If
you can get past the torture scene where the Nutcracker is force fed
walnuts in the hopes that his wooden head will break, just before
another character's real head is casually ripped off and tossed
around like a volley ball, just before Turturro's rat face sprouts the
most hideous set of massive teeth to signify his rage, then just
maybe you can last long enough to be disgusted by the hip hop-ified
classical music beat before the helicopter chase across the magical
city of Whogivesafuckia. Seriously, they don't even name the place
they are trying to save, or ever mention who lives there. You would
think it would be living toys, but they aren't. They seem to be
humans with toys, which are burned to block out the sun, but then
some of them are living toys, I think, or maybe they become human in
one world and not the other. I give up.
If
not for my shortsighted intentions to defend this film being the
reason I sat down to watch it in the first place, I almost certainly
would have put this review under another banner of the blog, This Is
A Thing That Exists, where I discuss movies too weird not to talk
about. This movie is not just bad, but fascinatingly bad, the kind of
bad that makes you simply marvel at the fact that anyone would ever
think it was a good idea. Who financed this movie and why? Am I
missing some grand unifying reason why this was justified as a
cinematic enterprise? The why of this movie is as elusive as the snow
flake ghosts that threaten to lure a young girl to her death by
compelling her to jump off a giant tree with the promise of letting
her fly. Oh yeah, I almost forgot about that part. Shit, it doesn't
even matter at this point. I'm sure I had some metaphor to throw out
just then that made sense in my head, but I just don't have the
strength anymore. The Nutcracker 3D doesn't suck; The Nutcracker 3D
is suck in movie form.
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