Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/29/09
To me, it didn't even seem
like a good idea at the time, but in the aftermath of the Lord of the
Rings trilogy and with the Harry Potter franchise kicking into
high gear, studios spent much of the mid-00's buying up the rights to fantasy
trilogies that had, we were assured, sold a whole lot of copies and as
such were EXACTLY like those Internationally-beloved properties. Many of
those first installments have reached the screen, and we're still waiting,
after the likes of Eragon and The
Golden Compass, for one of them to spawn even one sequel, let alone
two. After shuffling around the release schedule for two years (production
began in 2006), Inkheart seems unlikely to reverse the trend. Adapting
the first of Cornelia Funke's German-language Inkworld trilogy (which
also includes Inkspell and Inkdeath), writer David Lindsay-Abaire
and director Iain Softley have most of the pieces of a great fantasy adventure
lying around, but can't seem to assemble them into anything but a momentumless,
mildly diverting disappointment. A couple of good performances (including
a truly standout turn by Paul Bettany) and some nifty special effects keep
the plates spinning for a while, but Inkheart is the kind of movie
you're forgetting even as you watch it, not the kind that leaves you clamoring
for more.
There are, a narrator (Roger
Allam) informs us, people in the world who can cause things from books
to materialize simply by reading aloud about them. But when something
comes out, something else from the real world must go in to take its’ place.
Mo Folchart (Brendan Fraser) learns all this too late when he discovers
his “Silvertongue” power while reading an obscure fantasy book called Inkheart
to his infant daughter Meggie. Inkheart villains like Capricorn
(Andy Serkis) and nominal hero Dustfinger (Paul Bettany) flood his living
room and his wife Reza (Sienna Guillory) vanishes into the tome.
Nine years later, he’s scouring the world with now teenaged Meggie (Eliza
Hope Bennett) trying to find a copy of Inkheart from which to read
again in hopes of reversing the process. But the moment he finds
one, Dustfinger shows up, begging to return to his home. Mo won’t
take the chance, so the weasely hero instead makes a deal with Capricorn,
who attacks while the two are hold up at the palatial home of Aunt Elinor
(Helen Mirren). The whole lot of them are dragged to Capricorn’s
palace, where he’s got a basement full of literary creatures and a stuttering
Silvertongue (John Thomson) who can’t bring things like gold out of the
books quite right. Enter Mo, who pulls plenty of treasure from
Treasure Island, but only gets Farid (Rafi Gavron) out of 1,001
Arabian Nights. A few daring escapes later, the good guys are
off to Italy to find the author of Inkheart (Jim Broadbent) in hopes
that he’s got a copy that will allow Mo to set all this right. Little
does he suspect, he’s not the only Folchart with a silver tongue.
Given how little goes on,
Inkheart is quite difficult to explain, in large part because it
can’t ever quite pin down the logistics of the whole Silvertongue thing.
Sometimes you exchange one person for many, sometimes an animal for a person,
and by the climax, people and things are flying in and out of the book
at breakneck speed and there seems to be no price at all (more on that
climax later). The film also finds itself caught between the fact
that it desperately wants to promote the joys of reading, but this story
makes the act seem dangerous and terrifying. The notion of pulling
characters out of books into the real world is always interesting to me,
and when the movie sticks to characters from real books (mostly as highly
effective sight gags, although The Wizard of Oz’s Toto plays a key
role), it’s a hoot. But we never get enough of a sense of Inkheart
the book to feel like its’ characters have been pulled from anywhere but
the screenplay, and that just kills any potential in the notion of author
Fenoglio battling his own creations. And a gimmick of having those
summoned by a lesser Silvertongue come out with words written on their
faces and bodies might read clever, but on screen is a kinda dreary makeup
effect.
Fantasy adventure in general
is a tone that eludes Softley: there’s lots of running around, magical
spells are cast and an awesome monster is summoned for the big finish,
but events just tick off like something from a To Do List, without any
real momentum ever building. The movie doesn’t have one truly exciting
action sequence. Although it serves no purpose, one directorial flourish
I loved was that during the climax, Capricorn has a lackey with a black
and white movie camera commemorating the moment and the cuts to that old
film stock showing modern FX unfolding is like a slap in the face of the
kind of reality the rest of Inkheart never comes close to summoning.
That the movie works at all
is a tribute to the performances, particularly by Bettany, who manages
to make Dustfinger such a rich, full-bodied character that he transcends
a screenplay that clearly means for the character to be something more
mundane. But he’s got the fire the Inkworld part of the story otherwise
lacks; a real longing for a lost homeworld and a real rage at facing the
author who would dare to cast himself as his God. Frasier, hand-picked
by Funke to the point that she dedicated one of the novels to him, is overcast
in a revision of the story that relegates Mo to a supporting character
while promoting Meggie to the lead (or so comparing the Wikipedia synopsis
of the book with the movie tells me). He’s suitably heroic, handles
a greater-than-usual level of emotional baggage skillfully, and shows off
an excellent reading voice, but I couldn’t help think throughout that someone
should tell Mo that he’s just going to keep showing up a moment too late
to save the day so he needn’t try so hard. So too is the movie never
sure what to do with Mirren, whose character keeps resolving to stay, leave
and return at regular intervals as if simply demanding to be noticed.
Broadbent is a hoot as the self-absorbed author who never seems to notice
that if so few copies of Inkheart are in circulation, it’s probably
not nearly as good as he thinks it is. Serkis effectively oozes middle-management
evil as a henchman for whom the transfer of worlds also represents a promotion
since his boss stayed back in the book. Bennett makes an adequate
kiddie hero, but doesn’t command the screen the way her adult co-stars
do, making the narrative tilt toward Meggie more glaring and hard to understand.
Of course, there’s also ample evidence of reshooting to take advantage
of Bettany: watch how the final scenes seem to set him on one (sequel-friendly)
path, only to circle around and say “just kidding!”
Of course, across the board
the movie shows the waving of a post-production white flag acknowledging
that dreams of trilogy were not meant to be. Having not read the
book, I can’t speak to how well it was developed there, but Inkheart
lets a really promising concept get away from it. Memo to Hollywood:
if you want sequels, worry about making something people actually like
the first time, not buying your rights in threes. |
