A movie about exemplary 40s actor John Garfield? Cool. A film about US President James Garfield? No problem. But a movie about fat cat Garfield, the star of one of the least inspired newspaper comic strips ever to line birdcages coast to coast? We’re talking about an uphill battle, and Garfield: The Movie doesn’t even make it past the footstool.
As envisioned by creator Jim Davis, the cartoon Garfield is an ugly, unseemly beast, and that pretty much describes this starring vehicle as well. Small children will at least get their parents’ money’s worth — they’ll squeal with delight at the slapstick mayhem perpetrated by the computer-generated cat — but the movie will feel like a slow crawl through broken glass for anyone old enough to have mastered the fine art of shoelace-tying.
Bill Murray provides the voice of Garfield, and it’s dispiriting to realize this is coming on the heels of his multi-award-winning gem Lost In Translation. As in the comic strip, Garfield lives only to eat, sleep and torment his owner Jon (Breckin Meyer). But Garfield’s lazy existence as the master of his own domain gets disrupted by the arrival of Odie, a friendly pup that bonds immediately with Jon. (Inexplicably, Odie isn’t a CGI creation like Garfield but a real dog that looks nothing like his toon counterpart.) The plot moves from idle into low gear after Odie gets kidnapped by unscrupulous TV host Happy Chapman (Stephen Tobolowsky) and a suddenly brave and conscientious (as if!) Garfield must come to the rescue.
Is there anything positive to say about Garfield: The Movie? Sure: At least it’s not Family Circus: The Motion Picture. Trying to live through a film version of that atrocious comic strip would exhaust all of my nine lives — and then some.
In casting the lead roles for Two Brothers, director Jean-Jacques Annaud came up with a revolutionary idea: He used real tigers to play the parts of tigers! So forget about all those fake CGI critters that have become the norm as of late (e.g., those ridiculous wolves in The Day After Tomorrow) — Annaud’s approach is so retro that it’s practically progressive.
Then again, Annaud was the man behind 1989’s The Bear — a movie made before computers completely took over Hollywood — so he was already familiar with the proper protocol required when it comes to handling the wildlife. His movie’s all the better for it: Two Brothers is a tremendously touching story about two tiger cubs who get separated shortly after birth and are reunited under dire circumstances one year later. And being able to look into actual, emotion-filled eyes — rather than into artificially created marble-orbs — makes all the difference.
The acting is shaky when it comes from anybody not named Guy Pearce (the Memento star headlines as an author-cum-hunter), and small kids may get fidgety when the tigers aren’t front and center. Yet there’s a complexity involved in some of the characterizations that usually isn’t found in this sort of family film — the man vs. nature theme isn’t always painted in simplistic good vs. evil brushstrokes — and some of Annaud’s animal footage is simply remarkable. Two Brothers may look like the runt of the litter in this summer of elephantine blockbuster wanna-bes, but its roar is often deafening.
This article appears in Jun 23-29, 2004.
