Outside the Box: THE BOXTROLLS

The Boxtrolls is a marvelous stop-motion family film with all the twisted macabre charms of a Roald Dahl book or an Edward Gorey drawing. It conjures a wondrously imagined storybook Edwardian village of crooked cobblestone streets and leaning buildings clustered up one side of a skinny seaside hill and down the other. Deep below the town’s sewers live squat grey-green trolls clad in cardboard boxes. They’re harmless, kind-hearted beings who only come out at night, scavenging for bits and bobs they cobble together into steampunk creations that form their cavernous lair. But the humans fear them, leading to a storyline about the boxtrolls’ persecution. So, yes, this is a movie about learning to accept yourself and understand others. That’s like any number of family films. But this one has dastardly shifty villains, adults who cruelly marginalize children, and a society that willfully and mindlessly oppresses. You know, for kids!

Like the best kids’ films, it’s smart and involving on a level that can be appreciated by any audience. This one is tremendously imagined, creepy and cute in equal measure. The sophisticated, funny, and deeply felt script by Irena Brignull and Adam Pava, from a book by Alan Snow, moves briskly, cleverly deploying its moralizing in a parade of grotesqueries. The villain is an ugly, greedy man with spindly legs and a pendulous belly. His name is Archibald Snatcher (Ben Kingsley), and he leads the town’s crusade to eradicate the boxtrolls. He spreads propaganda accusing the trolls of eating children and leads his team of exterminators (Nick Frost, Richard Ayoade, and Tracy Morgan) out every night to capture the creatures. It’s all in hopes of being promoted into the town’s elite White Hat club.

It is not all twisted. Our hero is a boy (Isaac Hempstead Wright), apparently orphaned before the film starts, and raised by the boxtrolls as one of their own. He alone understands their adorable guttural babble, but he’s picked up human English as well. He thinks he’s a troll, but soon learns he’s a bridge between the town’s worlds. The boxtrolls fear the humans, who are controlled by leaders obsessed with hats and cheeses. They’re more than happy to delegate troll suppression to a creepy striver like Snatcher, the better to give them more time to devote to cheese. The mayor (Jared Harris) barely acknowledges his daughter (Elle Fanning), allowing her to sneak off and explore the world of the trolls. Both locales, above and below, are filled up with charming details and throwaway gags. You get the sense man and boxtroll would get along fine if only they could get over fears and prejudices.

A charmingly cracked story, the film features bouncy slapstick, clattering gadgetry, and a compassionately lumpy design. Painstakingly detailed in the way only stop-motion animation can be, the characters move like gangly puppets and interact with the world in a tangible way. Directors Graham Annable and Anthony Stacchi oversee enveloping 3D environments that enliven terrifically staged dollhouse sets. It feels both real and not in the same instant, in the way all stories do when you’re young. There’s childlike wonder in these frames. Movements carry a weight and presence, even as the events zip off confidently down whimsical alleys.

It's beautifully ugly, eccentric in every detail. This is a movie that features a man monstrously allergic to cheese who gobbles it down anyway, his face and limbs swelling with flabby pustules as it breaks out in bulging hives. (He’s cured by being covered in a writhing mass of leeches.) Henchmen have discussions about whether they’re “the good guys.” A little girl has a sense of morbid curiosity her father finds distasteful. The town is enamored of a secretive French warbler coming to town, one Madame Frou Frou. And then there are the trolls, who tinker, dance, and waddle around, then fold back into their boxes every night, stacking themselves gently into one big family cube. They mean well, and we want to see them coexist peacefully.

This is the third film from Laika, an Oregon-based stop-motion production company. The Boxtrolls fits in nicely with Coraline and ParaNorman in style and tone, forming a lovely set of richly imagined and fantastically clever movies to delight and thrill children of all ages. I think we can safely say they’ve become as dependable and singular an animation studio as Ghibli or Pixar. We know what to expect from them visually and emotionally – something skillfully dark and sweet. These are films with personality and feeling. When so much of Hollywood’s animated product is programmatic and conventional CGI homogeny, there’s definitely room for creative people willing to make earnest stories with sharp statements and distinctive imagery. How wonderful to have Laika. We can trust their heart and intelligence and retain the capacity to be surprised and charmed by their generously overflowing delights.

Mirror Image: THE DOUBLE

Richard Ayoade’s The Double is a movie that sounds intriguing. It’s about a man who discovers his new co-worker looks exactly like him. How interesting! It’s also a movie that looks great. Pass by it on cable and you just might linger, wondering what enjoyable goings-on take place inside the fanciful production design, dramatically lit and precisely shot. It is unfortunate, then, that the movie never develops much of interest within the confines of its compelling hook and fine design. It’s thin and empty, not so much inhabiting its looks and ideas as borrowing them. Like Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, which earlier this year doubled Jake Gyllenhaal to little interest, Ayoade, adapting a Dostoevsky story, has a terrific concept, a game cast, an interesting look, and nowhere to go.

The man at the center of the double dilemma is timid office drone Simon (Jesse Eisenberg). He does good work, but the world seems to crushingly ignore him, ensnaring him in bureaucratic red-tape mazes at best, skipping over him entirely at worst. The waitress at his favorite restaurant always brings him the wrong order. He nurses a crush on his neighbor and co-worker (Mia Wasikowska), but never acts upon it. He has great ideas to improve his office’s efficiency, but the boss (Wallace Shawn) brushes him aside, telling him to babysit his intern (Yasmin Page), a surly teenager who also happens to be his daughter. The world is a lonely, gloomy place for Simon.

In the peculiar world of the film, it always seems to be night. The characters are pale, their faces impassive, their words strung along into sentences of matter-of-fact, by-the-book knots. It’s a Terry Gilliam/Jean-Pierre Jeunet/Tim Burton kind of world with production designer David Crank providing flickering lights, oversized ducts and pipes, steaming vents, rusty mechanical contraptions, and spotty retro-futurist structures covered in elaborate alternative universe tech and bric-a-brac. The weight of all this busyness keeps Simon crushed down in the imagery, stark lighting highlighting his alienation from the busy people droning along through apparently much happier lives around him.

Enter James, a new co-worker the others in the office immediately take a liking to. He’s everything Simon isn’t: successful and confident to the point of arrogance. He also looks exactly like Simon, a funny coincidence and something no one else seems to notice or care about. The two men eventually get to know each other and even help each other out by switching places at crucial moments. But it’s all very strange and destabilizing for James, who is intimidated by his double. At one point he explains his insecurities, saying he “sees the man he wants to be, but can’t get there.” His wish is made real in the form of his double, allowing him to see the advantages and disadvantages of being a more forceful individual. On the one hand, he could go after what he wants. On the other hand, what if what he wants is wanted by his double as well? Ah, there’s the problem.

And so it’s double versus double or something like that as the story slowly drains down to its glum conclusions. Along the way, Ayoade exercises good formal control over the technical aspects of the picture, from the dim, whimsical production design to the precise blocking involved in doubling Eisenberg in many a shot, allowing him to interact with himself in tricky ways. Eisenberg is a performer good at suggesting jumpy neuroses, anxious intelligence, and tangled interior debates. No wonder he makes such a good scene partner for himself, playing essentially two halves of a whole character, a man’s inner emotional conflict made literal. Sometimes I got confused, not quite able to pin down which man was which, but he locates an emotional consistency that’s a solid anchor.

The character design is as sturdy and inscrutable as the dialogue is designed to be deadpan, the sets strikingly artificial, the plot cold and lost in its own thoughts. It’s a forced whimsy, happy to be odd and particular without much in the way of insight or inviting further consideration. There’s simply nothing pulling along the assemblage of influences and design choices into any sort of involving larger picture. There’s no reason to invest or care. Ayoade is a director of potential. His TV work, like cult favorite Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, is strong, but his cinematic efforts lag behind. This is his second film, after the coming-of-age Submarine, a similarly stylishly empty work of great control, thin substance, and borrowed imagination. I look forward to the day when he finds better material to match his talents. 

Suburban Space Invaders: THE WATCH

Turning out to be nothing more than a belabored, R-rated commercial for Costco (actual dialogue: “They really do have everything we need!), The Watch is a halfhearted action comedy content to do nothing surprising. The story, such as it is, kicks off when the local Costco manager (Ben Stiller) shows up to work one morning to find that the store has overnight turned into a crime scene. The local cop (Will Forte) informs him that the night watchman has been mysteriously murdered. Shaken up, Stiller puts out a call for his sleepy suburb to form a neighborhood watch and is a little disappointed that the only people who respond are a needy middle aged motormouth (Vince Vaughn) who just wants a break from intruding upon his teenager’s social life, an awkward wannabe vigilante (Jonah Hill), and a bumbling British man (Richard Ayoade) who wants to join a group to fit in with the locals.

Eventually it turns out that the murderer is an alien who is simply one of many who are already in the town, poised to phone home and start the invasion proper. So, it’s up to the four flawed guys to stop the space creatures before they can move forward with their plan. Not that the film gathers any momentum from this threat. No, the movie just meanders through typical moments of male gross-out humor bonding, stumbles into a lame Invasion of the Body Snatchers lite and then lazily gets up the effort to squeak out a typical shoot-‘em-up climax.  Altogether it feels like the result of letting a bad Apatow knockoff write and direct a Hollywood remake of Attack the Block. It’s lazily paced, painfully predictable and unimaginative in all aspects, like two faded copies of copies placed one over the other.

It didn’t have to be this way. The talent involved here is promising. The cast is made up of funny, skilled performers and I haven’t even mentioned Rosemarie DeWitt, relegated to a thanklessly underwritten role as Stiller’s wife, or Doug Jones, the incredible performer behind so many great screen creatures (not the least of which is Pan’s Labyrinth’s terrifying Pale Man) who suits up to play the aliens. But the story, written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (of the great raunchy teen comedy Superbad) and rewritten by Jared Stern (of the not-so-great Mr. Popper’s Penguins), is beat-by-beat dull and rote. It feels slapped together in a way that makes everyone involved appear to be shrugging towards paychecks. Everyone on screen has been vibrant and energetic, funny and sympathetic in other roles. Here, though, they’re all playing characters that are thinly sketched and vaguely off-putting while just going through the paces in a movie that can’t quite get its act together. It is witless and lame every step of the way.

The anemic script is certainly the key problem here, but it doesn’t help matters that its tone is so unformed. When it opens on Stiller narrating us through a typical day in the life of his character, the film appears to be sharpening its satirical claws on the gleaming store shelves and perfect suburban subdivisions, looking with scorn upon the hollow homogenized lifestyles of the characters. But, as more characters come into focus and the gears of the plot slowly get up to speed, it’s clear that this movie’s going nowhere fast. Strange detours into the kinky life of a creepy neighbor (Billy Crudup) and a half-formed subplot about a leering teenager (Nicholas Braun) after Vaughn’s daughter sap away momentum and cloud the tone. Are we supposed to actually validate the overzealous behavior of the central characters in so thoroughly, incompetently, poking around where they don’t belong? They’re hard to root for and when the plot resolves, it does so almost by accident.

The biggest disappointment here is the direction from Akiva Schaffer, not because it’s especially bad – it’s slick and competent – but because it’s so devoid of energy and creativity.  After directing so many terrific, hilarious Digital Shorts for Saturday Night Live and the smart-stupid new cult comedy classic Hot Rod, it’s unfortunate to see him deliver something so uninspired. There’s just about nothing here worth talking about or reacting to. I saw the movie amongst a boisterous crowd of people who, as the movie started, fell silent. As the movie played, we stayed silent. Then, a little over 90 minutes later, we all filed out. I went in hoping for a few laughs and left feeling dispirited. It’s not just bad; it’s nothing but missed opportunities all around.