Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
6/30/07
I often sniff derisively
at trailers when they use the phrase “From the studio that brought you...”
suggesting that the genius of a film you love came not from the actors,
writers, directors, cinematographers, composers, set designers and best
boys who actually made it, but rather the suits who signed their checks.
But it's pretty much impossible to resist the carefully plotted hype campaign
that has, from the moment I was first wowed by Toy Story over a
decade ago, sought to present Disney subcontractors Pixar as an authorial,
rather than corporate, entity. And so it is that one has come to
expect a higher level of skill and sophistication from animated films bearing
that label than those of rival studios or even plain old Disney itself.
Alas, while Ratatouille comes to us from acclaimed writer-director
Brad Bird, whose previous Pixar outing The Incredibles may be the
best movie ever produced under their brand, and has a look that absolutely
shines, it is a relentlessly average story with no memorable characters
and precious few laughs.
Remy (voice of Patton Oswalt)
isn't like other rats: he doesn't want to simply gather and devour
every piece of crap he can get his hands on. Instead, he wants to
savor food, and is inspired by watching the late TV chef Gusteau
(Brad Garrett) to teach himself to cook. His father Django (Brian
Dennehy) wants him to simply use his highly trained sense of smell to test
for poison. One night, Remy is caught out stealing spices from the
kitchen of the woman whose home houses their filthy, disgusting rat colony,
and the entire Rat Nation is forced to relocate. Remy gets separated
in the chaos and ends up alone in Paris, where he starts having imaginary
conversations with Gusteau and ends up in the kitchen of his restaurant.
Gusteau's has fallen on hard times, dismissed by Paris' most famous
food critic, Anton Ego (Peter O'Toole), and currently run by Skinner (Ian
Holm), a third-rate cook who's attaching the Gusteau name to every frozen
food he can find. Chance brings Remy together with Linguini (Lou
Romano), a garbage boy in the kitchen who dreams of being a chef.
Remy can cook, and Linguini can “look human”, so they pool their talents,
with the rat hiding under the human's hat and pulling his hair to move
him around like a marionette. It works like a charm: Linguini
finds fame as a chef and love with fellow cook Colette (Janeane Garofalo).
But there's trouble on the horizon: Skinner will do anything to hide
evidence that Linguini should be the restaurant's true owner, and the other
rats from Remy's old nest start showing up looking for food.
Ratatouille has a
lot of problems, but the biggest is that it's too long, too leisurely and
too banal to keep a person from obsessing over its' issues. The biggest
one is simple: rats are gross, and while Remy is at least kinda de-ratized
with his bluish hair and cute nose, an early shot of a falling ceiling
revealing a huge, wriggling nest of disgusting rats was about enough to
put me off thinking about popcorn for the rest of the film, let alone gourmet
food. The movie's grasping for one of those classic “I'm a woman
but I want to play professional team sports” or “I'm ugly but I want to
be a movie star” dilemmas that would make Ratatouille a classic
underdog story. But at the end of the day, no, I don't want my food
prepared by a disease-carrying rat. Then, there's the mechanism by
which Remy “communicates” with Linguini: not only would all that
hair-pulling hurt, but, how do I put this... pulling on someone's hair
just doesn't allow you to move them around. It's like a movie
about a bad baseball pitcher who can throw 100 milers per hour every time
a fly pokes him in the eye. This concept isn't fun, whimsical, or
much of anything. It lays there like... a dead rat (and there are
a few more of those on hand than the G-rating would suggest, so be warned).
Ratatouille looks
great: its' colors, textures, and character animation are light-years
ahead of what we saw in Toy Story all those years ago. But
while one expects big stars giving memorable performances as the voices
in a Pixar flick, this film falls short on both. Oswalt and Romano
are pretty much animation-average as characters whose respective Impossible
Dreams are mostly off the rack. And naming a French chef for Italian
food is typical of the movie's low level of linguistic creativity.
The best performance comes from O'Toole as food critic Anton Ego, which
is bad news because Ego is the film's most grating character, a “pity me”
rant about the horror of being reviewed by a filmmaker who's received nothing
but praise throughout his career (at least M. Night Shayamalan had gotten
torched by critics for The Village before making a similar mistake
in last year's Lady in the Water).
In the end, Ratatouille
isn't quite as bad as the sum of its' problems: it's pleasant enough
and I'm sure will appeal more to moviegoers better versed in the culture
of fine dining than myself (and thus more likely to share the movie's general
level of snobbery about all thing culinary). But it falls far below
the high bar set by The Incredibles, whose “Don't be afraid to be
great” message seemed so much more heartfelt than the assorted generic
uplift dolled out by the characters here. If you're inclined to think
of Pixar the way you would, say, Steven Spielberg, then Ratatouille
is a lot more The Lost World than Schindler's List. |
