Reboot Hill

Rango. Written by John Logan, Gore Verbinski & James Ward Byrkit. Directed by Gore Verbinski.

It seems as if a reviewer could make a career these days out of simply covering new animated features. And it wouldn’t be a half bad occupation, considering that the Pixar/Disney franchise has now pretty much standardized an approach that both mollifies the critics and makes mountains of money—that is, deliver slapstick and goofy characterizations for the kids, while offering enough winking, poke-you-in-the-ribs inside jokes for adults to keep them from resisting the next spectacle. The list of successes using this formula is long already (the Shreks, the Toy Story movies, Wall-E, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Up!, How to Train Your Dragon, etc.) and is getting longer.

            The latest instance, Paramount/Nickelodeon’s Rango, is as typical a case as any—a satirical Western about a cowardly chameleon (voiced by Johnny Depp) who gets abandoned in the Mojave Desert and blunders his way to the town of “Dirt”. There, the unscrupulous Mayor (a tortoise voiced by Ned Beatty) and his poisonous henchman, Rattlesnake Jake (Bill Nighy) conspire to take control of the town’s valuable real estate by withholding its water supply. Rango tries to thwart them by reinventing himself, in proper frontier style, as a fearless lawman, allying himself along the way with a girl lizard with an intermittent catatonia problem (Isla Fisher) and a half-squashed armadillo (voiced, almost inevitably, by Alfred Molina).

            Rango is a clever story, made by people who know their classic (that, is non-kiddie) movies. Ned Beatty’s tortoise/mayor is obviously inspired by John Huston’s water-stealing magnate in Chinatown;  the Clint Eastwood “Man With No Name” Westerns are reflected in a cameo by Timothy (Deadwood, Justified) Olyphant as the Eastwood-esque “Spirit of the West”, a ghost who manifests to inspire Rango to go ahead, dare to be the legend he’d like to be. It’s also full of other vivid characterizations such as the grisled gambler (a half-mauled rabbit with one ear chewed off), the mariachi chorus of burrowing owls, the bullying Gila monster, the big-eyed, pig-tailed schoolgirl who happens to be a possum. All are tonally dead-on and amusing…more or less.

            So why does all this sound like grudging praise? I guess it comes down not to what romps like Rango offer, but what they don’t. Quick exercise: think about the all-time classics of movies for kids. Think about titles like Bambi, The Wizard of Oz, Dumbo, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Yellow Submarine, etc.—films that not only killed a winter afternoon, but defined movie magic for young eyes. What these offered was a sense of wonder—of safe and vivid entrée into a big, scary but fascinating adult world. More to the point, they didn’t specialize in ransacking other movies and TV shows for meta-cultural references. They didn’t implicitly disrespect childhood by making snarky, winking references over children’s heads. (The Warner Bros. cartoons, Bugs Bunny and Co., did trade in pop satire. But those weren’t really for kids, anyway.)
            Smart as Rango is, it contains not one original idea. Where the classics inspired curiosity about the world a child was about to enter, Rango and its kind simply speak in a sort of terminally hip cultural code, the endpoint of which is not wonder, but a smug, Bieberesque nod. The movie’s spirit ex machina, the Spirit of the West, perfectly typifies this: instead of a genuine cowboy or prospector, he’s just a old guy wandering in the desert in a golf cart, scavenging for treasure with a metal detector. This, it appears, what the West and its poets have become—drifters on a deleted cultural landscape, sifting the dust for remnants of a better time.

Copyright 2011 Nicholas Nicastro