28: Wooden Words

Awards season is finally here, which means my inbox has been inundated with For Your Consideration screener links and screening invites. This is new for me; it's the first year I'm a voting member of a critics circle. Ever since I started writing about movies in earnest I've felt a responsibility as a critic to pay attention to the state of the film industry and to the movies that are good, but this year is the first time I feel I’ve had to pay closer attention to the full breadth of the state of cinema, the bad as well as the good.

My own sense of insufficiency has picked this moment to come roaring out into the light. There is simply not enough time to watch everything. I know that it's impossible even for full-time critics to see every single movie. I have a day job that I genuinely like, and that I cannot pay the bills without. I’m good at my day job. I also like to think that I'm a pretty good critic, and that being good at my day job and being good at criticism are two things that I can do simultaneously. Still, I often feel as though I'm playing catch-up with the others in the critical field, simply because I cannot dedicate all my time to it.

I know this is inexperience speaking; I'll get better at splitting my time once I've been through a few awards seasons. In the meantime, I'm trying to stay open. I don't want to stagnate in the in-between; I want to remain curious, and maybe even vulnerable, as I work on honing my craft.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson) renders the familiar story strange again through stop-motion animation. One of the joys of the format is that the mannequins are complex and tactile. Gepetto (voiced by David Bradley) has a thick beard with locks that look like they've been shaped from wood. There are little knots and cracks in Pinocchio’s (voiced by Gregory Mann) body, and he has grain on the back of his head and a hole where his heart should be. These details are relics of the piece of pine he's been carved from, and the hole is a sign that he can't be a replacement for the son that Gepetto lost before him, evidence that he'll need to grow before the other people around him consider him fully human. It's also a convenient residence for the cricket (voiced by Ewan McGregor) who serves as his conscience and teacher.

The film is at its best when it’s playing with a sense of horror or of mystery. When Gepetto builds Pinocchio, he does so out of drunken rage and sadness, and the movie heightens Gepetto's solitary grief by referencing various Frankenstein movies as he carves the wooden boy. Lightning flashes as the carver coaxes life out of the chunk of wood he'd just cut from a tree. The camera twists itself into Dutch angles, and the shadows deepen until Gepetto's home turns into a German Expressionist set. Pinocchio is an expression of grief and (like Frankenstein's monster) an attempt to cheat death. Up until this point, Gepetto has been able to bottle up his sadness alone. He feels horrified when he realizes that the thing he's created can testify to his sense of loss better than he could ever express on his own. His sense of horror compounds when he realizes that the wooden boy he made as a replacement for his dead son has a mind and a personality of his own.

The fascists under Mussolini want to exploit Pinocchio, because the puppet cannot die. Pinocchio's happy to play along with everyone else, because he is guileless and cannot imagine anyone else having ill intentions, either. There’s a good metaphor here for submitting to authority simply because authority has asserted itself, legitimately or no, but the movie doesn’t quite manage to draw the lines strongly enough, so the metaphor gets muddled. Pinocchio is referred to as a puppet by everyone else around him, but he isn’t really a puppet, he’s a doll, an effigy, something for other people’s hopes and desires to be mapped onto.

The Pinocchio of this version of the story is an agent of chaos and good will. His energy manifests in the form of song and dance, in incessant questions, and in enthusiasm for everything new he encounters. I personally didn’t find the character endearing, although this is likely due to the script, which was co-written by del Toro and Patrick McHale. McHale's sense of humor has a rhythm that is literally off-beat, with punchlines landing half a second later or earlier than expected. Sometimes this really works—there's a visual joke involving an explosive mine and a seagull that had me howling—but almost all the jokes live on this strange tempo, which left me feeling out of sync with the film.

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio is out in limited theatrical release this weekend. It will be available to stream on Netflix December 9.

What I talked about:

For this week's Seeing & Believing, Kevin and I reviewed She Said (out in theaters now). It's a dramatization of the reporting of Harvey Weinstein's sexual abuses as a Hollywood producer; while I think it's important not to shove these stories under the rug, and while I think the movie tells its story competently, I wish it had a little more art to it. (Carey Mulligan's great, though.) For our Watchlist pick, I paired She Said with Shirkers, Sandi Tan's 2018 documentary about the making, loss, and recovery of her 1992 student film of the same name. Both movies approach the ways that women are shut out of the film industry in very different ways, and I'd argue that Shirkers does a better job of exploring sexism in filmmaking than most other movies that are explicitly about the fallout of Harvey Weinstein's conviction.

What I watched:

I caught a critics' screening of Rian Johnson's Glass Onion ahead of its Thanksgiving weekend limited run. The movie will be out on Netflix right around Christmas, but if you have the time—or need to get out of the house this upcoming weekend—it's well worth seeking out a screening. Johnson & co. clearly had a blast making the movie, and the script is playful and smart, if a touch shaggier than Knives Out. Even if the script were bad (which it isn't), you should catch Glass Onion for the set and costume design alone. Kevin and I will be reviewing it in full during Thanksgiving week's Seeing & Believing episode, so stay tuned.