Dumbo (2019)
Dir. Tim Burton
Screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Based on Disney's DUMBO by Otto
Englander, Joe Grant and Dick Huemer, which in itself was based on Dumbo,
the Flying Elephant by Helen Aberson and Harold Pearl
Starring Colin Farrell, Nico Parker, Michael Keaton,
Danny DeVito, Eva Green, Alan Arkin
I was going to begin by saying that 2019’s
DUMBO takes Disney's recent "why does this exist?" energy to bold new
heights, but I guess that's not really true; nothing could have less
reason to exist than a scene-by-scene photorealistic LION KING remake, and
that’s still too traumatically fresh a memory to ignore. We’ve already reached
rock bottom, no need to indulge in any more hyperbole than necessary. But just
because kicking you in the balls is clearly preferable to shooting you in the
face, that doesn’t make the former commendable behavior. DUMBO may not be a
harrowing, soul-churning pinnacle of anti-art the way LION KING 2019 –good God,
they came out the same year—was, but it has a different kind of
"why does this exist" cloud hanging over it, avoiding Disney's recent
fetish for grotesquely tarted-up slavish recreations of their beloved animated
classics… by instead throwing out virtually every single part of the original
movie which bears the same name and replacing it with --well, not quite a new movie,
exactly, because despite adding a second, comfortably feature-length scenario
to the runtime, the new material isn't anywhere near cohesive enough to call a
"movie" in its own right-- but certainly a whole lot of new stuff.
The "new stuff" consists of
basically everything apart from the concept of a flying baby elephant named
Dumbo who resides in a circus and is separated from his mother. Anything else
from the original DUMBO –for example, original surrogate protagonist Timothy
the mouse-- is included here only in the form of stultifying throwaway
references, often hitting exactly that sweet spot of being far too emphasized
to ignore, but having no meaning whatsoever outside their reference to the
original film. Which mean that if you haven't seen 1941's DUMBO, this movie
will be a baffling puzzle of inexplicable and meaningless visual cues.* But if
you did see 1941's DUMBO and enjoyed it, you are now stuck with a movie
that has functionally almost nothing in common with it, but insists on
constantly reminding you of it. Cool.
The setting for the 2019 version remains
the same as its predecessor, albeit with some odd added specificity. As before,
we are introduced first to a rag-tag circus embarking on a tour of the American
South at the end of World War I. This particular interwar American South,
you will quickly notice, is very pointedly a land of harmonious integration and
racial diversity, where an interracial family traveling by rails might receive
a hearty handwave from the simple white farmers working the fields they’re
passing by on their way to perform in front of a merrily heterogeneous audience
which has apparently never known division along lines of gender, race,
nationality, religion, or economic status. This is a little jarring, needless
to say, but after some reflection, I’ve decided that it was ultimately the
right approach, at least if we assume that this all absolutely had to be
set in 1919 for some reason. You’d be entirely justified, were you so inclined,
to slam it for whitewashing the brutality of segregation and Jim Crow, but hey,
this was always fantasy – might as well be everyone’s fantasy. Once
you’ve committed to “flying elephant” as a premise, I think it’s safe to say
you’ve bought yourself sufficient distance from reality to be absolved of
responsibility for hard-hitting journalistic accuracy, especially in service of
broadened approachability. Or at least, I thought so until the movie arrived at
its final act and decided it had some very serious thoughts on the
morality of keeping animals in the circus. So, no problem brushing aside a
century of brutal racial oppression in the name of fantasy, but cruelty to
performing animals is just too pressing an issue to stay silent about. Got it.
At any rate, after a very leisurely
scene-setting, our story starts to get going with the birth of the title character,
a little elephant with gigantic ears which for some reason everyone considers a
hideous, unspeakable deformity which brands him forever a freak and an outcast.
Maybe because they never invented racism in this alternate reality, people are
just real assholes about ears instead, I dunno.
Of course, he is a freak and should
be cast out, but not for his ears. I mean, look at this fucking abomination:
This goddam thing looks like a baby
C’Thulu cosplaying as Robert Blake’s character from LOST HIGHWAY. It reminds me
of those grotesque “realistic” renderings of The Simpsons or Spongebob
or what have you. This character design was all well and good in the
squishy abstraction of cartooning, but you rip it, against God’s will, off the
page and into the photorealistic real world, and you’ve got an unholy nightmare
on your hands. Maybe COOL WORLD had a good point about keeping the ‘doodles
where they belong.
Fortunately for the little freak,
children can’t recognize the face of a Lovecraftian blasphemy when it’s staring
right at them with its hateful squid eyes, and “Dumbo” finds allies in two hardscrabble
circus urchins, siblings Milly (Nico Parker, giving a performance which cannot
be described without the words “affectless automaton”) and Joe (Finley Hobbins,
who the movie is so actively disinterested in that I frequently forgot this
character existed while he was on-screen). The children discover Dumbo’s
amazing power of flight (a feat of fanciful delight in the original cartoon,
and a source of profoundly disturbing wrongness when translated to
weighty, high-definition photorealism) which drags the young pachyderm from
despised outcast to celebrated circus star.
So far, so good; sounds basically like
the story of the original DUMBO with kids subbed for mice, right? And yet,
while all of that happens on-screen, the above description doesn’t
really accurately describe the movie, because it makes it sound as though this
is Dumbo’s story. That would be a perfectly reasonable assumption to make,
considering the title and the source material, but that is not the movie we
have as a subject here today. You see, in a baffling feint towards gritty realism
for a movie which --I feel I must stress this point-- features a flying
elephant, Dumbo and his fellow circus animals do not talk or appear to
experience any emotional state beyond what would be expected for an average trained
circus animal.** Despite the disturbingly expressive face, Dumbo’s enormous,
unnatural eyes stare impassively out from an empty, soulless void utterly alien
to any human sensibility, and hence, despite various human characters
frequently announcing aloud what his desires and wishes may be, he is really
more of a MacGuffin than a character. He’s central to the plot, but more of an
object to be acted upon by his human co-stars than a protagonist in any proper
sense.
 |
| Horrible. Just horrible. |
What we need, then, are human
characters, and obviously the more the better. What’s that you say, we
already have two human children to act as surrogate protagonists, and even one
of those two is flagrantly unnecessary? No no, I mean celebrity human
characters. We’re trying to spend 170 million bucks here. What’s that you say,
there’s no possible artistic purpose in adding extraneous adults to this
already entirely self-contained little fairy tale? What is this “artistic
purpose” you speak of?
Therefore to fill the absolutely
unavoidable storytelling necessity of having at least three A-list names
printed on the movie poster, the simple story of talking circus animals trying
to reunite an outcast baby elephant with its mother has been larded up with
about 90 new humans (we do not, if I recall, see a single human face in the
original DUMBO), all of whom must be given something to do (because they
have no obvious purpose in the story as originally conceived) and yet not quite
enough to do to constitute an
"arc" for any of them. Therefore recoil in horror as Colin Farrell,
Danny DeVito, and Michael Keaton are dutifully trotted out for no clear reason,
all giving career-worst performances while at the same time giving the distinct
and worrying impression that they're trying very hard.*** They’re eventually
joined by Eva Green, who manages to maintain her dignity rather better, and
considering she must endure the mortifying indignity of being CGI'd onto the
back of a flying baby elephant, this may be evidence that she is the greatest
thespian who ever lived. Alan Arkin also appears in three scenes and so openly
doesn't give a shit that you've kind of got to respect him for it. Sometimes being
a pro means making a sincere effort regardless of the circumstances… but
sometimes it just means recognizing a hopeless cause and giving up gracefully. Look,
he set his margarita down for the take, what more do you want?
The movie, alas, is too brain-dead to
be able to follow Arkin’s example. Consequently, an absolutely exhausting
amount of time is taken to establish each of these characters, even though only
one has any narrative purpose whatsoever. Or, rather, only one is so completely
extraneous to the original plot that establishing him essentially drags the
movie in entirely new direction, thus creating a new narrative purpose for the
character to fulfill. You see, once the movie has dutifully plodded through
every single plot point from the original DUMBO, minus any part where animals
talk or racism is happening, we’re still barely even sitting at the 40-minute
mark. Now, the original DUMBO is only 62 minutes, but remember, we’re trying to
spend $170 million here, and are therefore contractually obliged to pile as
many convoluted plot points as money will allow into an appalling snake’s nest
of wriggling chaos. That’s the law. And so, out of the blue appears Keaton, as
a flamboyant, rapacious capitalist who buys the circus and immediately sets to
work exploiting his star attraction, sadistically endangering his human
employees, and eventually just straight up announcing that he’s going to murder
Dumbo’s mom for absolutely no reason whatsoever. To accomplish these goals, he
essentially kidnaps the entire cast and forces them into servitude in his
garish, art-deco dystopian theme park known as “Dreamland.”
Savvy viewers will quickly notice that
not a single detail of this has any relationship whatsoever to the 1941 movie
DUMBO, which doesn’t even have a central villain character and is more about
the generalized cruelty and randomness of the world. This is, then, basically a
movie and its demented sequel uncomfortably shackled together roughly halfway
though, as if somebody had edited BABE and PIG IN THE CITY to bare-bones
shells, chopped the credits off the former, and then run them back to back as
one movie. It’s deeply weird storytelling, but at least once Keaton appears the
movie finds some focus; absent any kind of identifiable protagonist, it locates in its antagonist at least some measure of organization which utterly eludes it
during the opening 45 minutes of wheezily recycled non-story. That doesn’t make
it good, because it’s nothing of the sort, but at least it’s not quite so
shapeless and inexplicable.
Speaking of the villain, what are we
to make of the fact that, with his flashy showmanship, single-minded
reckless ambition, and ostentatious theme park (complete with
Epcot-center-esque “City of Tomorrow!”) this despicable sociopath is an
unavoidable analog for Walt Disney himself? The comparisons are far too
specific to even entertain the idea that this is not where the movie wants us
to go, but why does it want us to go there? Is this some kind of sniveling JURASSIC
WORLD-style apology for the tortured needlessness of the thing we’re
watching, couched in ironic self-awareness? Is writer Ehren Kruger (damned
forever for his part in writing three of five TRANSFORMERS films, and also producing
the spectacularly moronic DREAM
HOUSE, which is maybe even more embarrassing than having written it, though
at least he can hold his head up with pride as the scribe of RENDEER GAMES)
possibly deluded enough to believe this is somehow subversive? Or should we
just consider this a tortured cry for help from the subconscious of Tim Burton,
who Disney kidnapped and replaced with a TWIN PEAKS evil doppelgänger sometime
in the mid-2000s? I’d dearly like to believe in the latter to be the case, but
frankly by this point in his career Burton seems to have less in common with
the misunderstood weirdos of the circus than he does with Keaton’s mercenary hired
goons who happily trot off to murder Dumbo’s mom when their Disney-like boss
tells them to, no questions asked.
Indeed, I’ve put off saying so as long
as possible, but now there’s no escaping it, so let’s just face facts: Tim
Burton is credited as the director here. He’s been in bored corporate lackey
mode long enough now that I guess I can’t claim it’s a surprise, but even so, DUMBO
2019 conveys an alarming sense not just that the director’s a bored
hack, but that there’s nobody at the wheel at all. Maybe twice in the movie he
seems to perk up a little around some of the garish sets of “Dreamland,” but
even the circus itself, which seems like the kind of thing Burton should have
been able to work magic with in his sleep, is a disappointing nothing, lacking
even the flop-sweating overdesign of 2005’s CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY
and 2010’s ALICE IN WONDERLAND. It’s a dreary, lazily shot-on-soundstages huddle
of low, perfunctory structures populated by limply defanged stereotypes whom
the movie is far too fretfully woke to allow to lean into their inherent
cartoonishness, but also dismissively disinterested in imbuing with any other
traits (at least DeObia Oparei, as the circus’ strongman/bookkeeper, gets to
make some archly funny faces). The whole thing is then color-corrected into an
unsettling alien landscape of not-quite-right chromatic mismatches, where the
grass is an odd pine green verging on blue, and the sky is perpetually tinged
with an anxiety-inducing orange-red, as if the sun was always right about to
set, even when that’s manifestly not the case.
According to the film’s press kit, the
production design drew inspiration from the paintings of Edward Hopper, an odd
choice any way you want to look at it -- Hopper’s best known work came from
decades after the movie’s 1919 setting, and is marked by a spare, quiet sense
of modern alienation, making it a baffling aesthetic touchstone for a
childrens' fantasy—but made even weirder by the fact that the movie’s nettled
plottiness and overabundance of unnecessary characters all but ensures that
Hopper’s serene minimalism is entirely out of the question.**** The only way
this makes any sense is as an explanation for why Burton’s recent penchant for seizure-inducing
overproduction is ratcheted down to simply garish overproduction.
It’s depressing possible that this is what Burton believes qualifies as
“minimalism” by this point in his career -- although it’s probably a lot more
likely that this is just a simple case of barely giving a shit at all, and
having his production crew try to run cover by throwing out an aesthetic which wouldn’t
be immediately familiar enough for most people to call their bluff.
 |
| Let's compare this 1957 Hopper painting entitled Western Hotel... |
 |
| ...to this frame, from 2019's DUMBO. Anybody else not seeing much similarity? |
Which is, ultimately, the real problem
here: despite the effortful ponderousness inherent in any movie pushing a 200
million dollar budget, there’s not a single aspect of this that doesn’t seem to
be operating on autopilot. At no point throughout the momentum-free 112
minutes***** does the movie ever make even the flimsiest argument as to why
anyone thought it would be worth making; there’s nary a character, setpiece,
storyline, or sequence that feel inspired by recognizable human interest. The sole
artistic inspiration in this entire sorry affair was the marketing departments’
dead-eyed certainty that people will pay to see an insanely expensive iteration
of a recognizable brand name. That’s the movie they tasked Burton and co with
making, and that’s what they got: a huge pile of busy but meaningless narrative
clutter indifferently trying to obscure the fact that this exists exclusively
to remind you of that famous thing you’ve already seen. Despite all the added
narrative detritus, there is literally no other purpose here, and the movie never
even pretends to aspire to any. It is more reference than film.
This tendency reaches its zenith
during a little vignette –too insubstantial to call a “scene”—where Dumbo sits
in a tent while some clowns blow large, elaborate bubbles in the air while a
wordless snippet of the tune “Pink Elephants On Parade” --the big showpiece
hallucinatory number from the original (brought to the pinnacle of its form by Sun-Ra and the Solar
Arkestra in 1988)-- wheezes over the soundtrack. This all plays out in an
entirely literal, straightforward way; there’s nothing subjective of surreal
about it, we’re just watching a CG elephant baby watch a mildly impressive
circus act set to inexplicably ominous orchestration for a minute or two, while he kills some time. There’s no reason for
this to happen; Disney in 2020 isn’t going anywhere near “drunk baby elephant”
territory, and it has no baring whatsoever on the plot and is never referenced
again.
Now, there isn’t exactly an
overwhelming narrative necessity for this sequence in the original film,
either, but the reason for including it is immediately obvious: just in the
fun of it. It exists entirely for a bunch of hungry, energized artists to indulge
in the sheer joy of going hogwild animating a bunch of surreal nonsense. Their
delight in it is palpable, and its ability to inspire similar delight has not
diminished in 80 years, not due to any quantifiable utility, but entirely
because it is a curious bauble, a creation entirely of whimsy.
 |
| Again, let's compare.... this still from the original sequence... |
 |
| ... to this one from 2019. Which one of these looks like a human being actually cared about it? |
That is categorically not so in 2020;
here, the same basic elements exist entirely to fulfill a rote function… and
that function is simply to mirror something else that already exists. There is
no whimsy here, no sense of artistic exhilaration; hell, there’s barely even
any cynical, pandering calculation. Nobody ever even bothered to ask why.
The sequence, like the movie itself, takes for granted the idea that creation and simulacrum are indistinguishable, that the act of
evoking is functionally identical to the act of creating. It is, in that sense,
very nearly some kind of experimental postmodern gamble that content is
completely meaningless in the face of context, challenging us to ask if meaning itself is purely a construct, a function of the viewer’s applied cultural baggage
projected not onto the screen, but into our own internal landscape, where it
can be given whatever meaning we find useful.
But I cannot concur. A pipe is an
exceedingly useful tool, should I fancy a smoke. A painting of a pipe merely
reminds me that I want to smoke. One is the inevitable outcome of human
ingenuity and desire; the other is an advertisement. It’s why Magritte titled
his famous painting The Treachery of Images. The evocation of “Pink Elephants,”
and of 1941’s DUMBO more broadly, is equally treacherous here. The images of
2020’s DUMBO might conjure some vague nostalgia for the real thing, but they
have no meaning of their own, and they were never meant to. Ceci n'est pas une DUMBO. Ceci n'est pas une
film, even. It’s just a very
long, very expensive callback. And not even a very entertaining one, at that.
That said, just looking at Dumbo’s awful
CGI face for two hours conjured the most raw, primal horror I’ve felt for a
movie in quite some time. This isn’t an uncanny valley, it’s the fucking
uncanny Mariana Trench. DUMBO 2019 inspires very few emotions other than
despairing tedium, but profound spiritual disquiet is a feeling, and if,
as is sometimes postulated, the purpose of art is to draw a reaction from the
viewer, I guess you could still say that ol’ Tim Burton managed to make some extremely
potent art afterall, despite himself. Recommended for fans of ANGST
and A SERBIAN FILM and anyone who wants to see just how much implacable, disturbing
wrongness they can withstand. Otherwise, you’re better off forgetting this ever
existed as quickly as possible. And fortunately, other than some lingering
elephant-related nightmares, that shouldn’t be too hard at all.
* Good luck to the new-to-DUMBO kiddies trying to figure out why
the plot stops dead for a few minutes to watch an elaborate bit of bubble-art
while a snatch of unaccountably creepy music plays in the background. Viewers of
the 1941 version will recognize this as a dismal, watered-down tribute to the
"Pink Elephants" showstopper in the original, but without that bit of
knowledge it must surely seem utterly inexplicable. In fact, it bears such an
uncanny visual resemblance to the "Opera scene" in STAR WARS III:
REVENGE OF THE SITH (elaborately dressed dignitaries in box seats having a
fraught conversation while they half-watch an elaborate 3D bubble show in a
darkened, circular amphitheater, with a similar color scheme) that I would not
be surprised to learn that this is the more common interpretation of the scene
being referenced (there is no way to interpret it as anything but a
reference to something, because the movie focuses on it so insistently
and yet it has no bearing on the plot or any other context of any kind) so it's
simply a matter of whether most audiences will have any reference for it at
all.
** I’m aware that Dumbo doesn’t speak in the original either, but
having all the other animals speak gives us a clearer sense that these are, to
some degree, anthropomorphized surrogates for humans with the kind of fully
articulated, complex emotional lives you’d need in order to be, you know, the
protagonist of a movie. Here, no such luck; sometimes the humans speculate on
what Dumbo must want, but it’s genuinely up for debate if he has any fucking
clue what’s happening to him, or any clear opinion about it. This is basically
a slightly less sexy THE SHAPE OF WATER.
*** This is a particular shame on the part of Farrell, who
actually has a shockingly passable track record of appearing in pointless
remakes and giving excellent performances (see FRIGHT NIGHT, TOTAL RECALL, THE
BEGUILED). Alas, his morose one-note (or less) blob of a character, combined
with a somewhat labored Southern accent, defeats any effort he might be making
.
**** It goes without saying that Hopper never painted anything
remotely like the art deco futurism which comprises the latter half of the
movie, but even the warmer earlier scenes don’t seem to fit at all with his
style, except maybe in the sense of the movie’s unusual palette.
***** Psychotically long for an adaptation of DUMBO, but at least
it manages to come in under two hours, which was not at all a sure thing given
that some of these live-action remakes’ aggressive runtimes are now edging
dangerous close to the 130 minute mark
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