Spy Game: THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E.

Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a sparkling big-screen adaptation of the 1960s’ spy show, is a super dry espionage spectacle. Its director is at his best when he’s playing with wide-frame action (shown off wonderfully in his Robert Downey Jr-starring Sherlock Holmes adaptations), intricately convoluted plotting (in Holmes and his scrappy British gangster pictures), and long winding scenes of circular dialogue that simply enjoys the pleasures of hearing pretty people speak barbed banter. It all comes together to make an U.N.C.L.E. oozing charisma out of each impeccably designed, handsomely photographed shot. It’s slight and knows it, content simply to groove on a 60’s spy vibe, like Le Carré lite, or Diet Fleming. Other than some computer-assisted camera swopping and gliding, it’d be pretty much the same thing if it were the long-lost hippest spy movie of 1963. (Well, second best. It’s no From Russia With Love.)

Ritchie and co-writer Lionel Wigram have cooked up a capering jaunt through Cold War tensions, used for little more than their vintage analog throwback appeal. They find a swaggering American spy, an ex-thief turned master of misdirection named Napoleon Solo (Henry Cavill), clashing with a Russian spy, a powerful Soviet bruiser named Illya Kuryakin (Armie Hammer). The two antagonistic national forces are forced to work together when British intelligence (personified by Jared Harris, then Hugh Grant) uncovers word that a horrible nuclear MacGuffin is in the hands of a dastardly aristocratic European couple (Elizabeth Debicki and Luca Calvani). The device will give whoever controls it power over the entire globe. That’s bad enough to get the Americans and Russians on the same page.

The following espionage and heist tomfoolery allows plenty of room for Cavill and Hammer to create a prickly competition. They never work together, exactly. It’s more like parallel missions reluctantly leaning on the other when things get diciest. Between them is a beautiful German woman (Alicia Vikander), a pawn smuggled out from behind the Berlin Wall in order to get the agents closer to her ex-Nazi uncle (Sylvester Groth), a key to finding the whatchamacallit and saving the world. She’s more charming than both men put together, and more than eager to stand up for herself and provide advice as to how the mission could be better executed. What starts as a standard damsel role wrests control over the proceedings before falling back into victimhood for the slam-bang action-based ending. Ritchie finds satisfyingly peculiar ways to show off the film’s adventure, often in the background, like my favorite moment, a boat chase that happens almost entirely off screen while a character takes a breather, dryly regarding the chaos from the vantage point of his impromptu picnic.

Bursting with star charisma, the lead trio of capable undercover agents flirtatiously needles each other about malfunctioning gadgets, critiques wardrobe choices, and withholds key information from one another. In true spy movie fashion, they all have their secret motives. But with so much buried intent in the characters’ behaviors, the film’s pleasures are nonetheless all surface. Joanna Johnston’s costumes are perfectly tailored. Daniel Pemberton's score is swinging sixties' frothiness. John Mathieson’s cinematography has an unnatural CGI flow, but a vintage crispness to its symmetries, eventually bursting forth with zippy split-screens instead of crosscutting when the action reaches its zenith. It’s all about showcasing handsome people in beautiful clothing, luxuriating in trading innuendoes and teasing insults, and enacting clockwork double-crosses with zigzagging spycraft. It’s fizzy and fine, an undemanding aesthetic delight.

West Coast Story: STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

It never fails to amaze me how all musicians’ biopics eventually turn into the same movie. Once they get past the specifics of where and when their particular stars burst into success, and the exciting early flashes of creativity and fame, it’s always contract disputes, fights over attribution and compensation, battles with drugs and/or disease, struggles with jealousies and egos, and finally a reckoning with past mistakes that somehow cements the subjects’ place in pop culture history. It’s one of the movies' most predictable formulas, a cross-promotional opportunity in the form of music business mythologizing. That a wide swath of industry legends, varied in time, place, genre, and character, can be reduced and inflated to weirdly similar tropes is more than a bit tiresome. And yet, the form holds steady and even occasionally jolts to life because 1.) when it works it works, and 2.) it’s so often true.

Take Straight Outta Compton for example, an up-tempo and glossy reenactment of the rise of gangsta rap on the West Coast in the late-80s and early-90s. It blasts to life with capable and exciting rising action, charting the success and decline of the groundbreaking hip-hop group N.W.A. with energy. The guys in the group came of age in Compton neighborhoods rife with poverty, feuding gangs, and constant police brutality. They turned the frustrations and pleasures of their daily lives into raunchy rhymes set to catchy beats, telling the truth of their experience in a way that spoke to others like them, and to a mainstream eager to eat up that authenticity. It’s a common trope for movies like this to say that the music in question was unlike anything heard before. But here we not only see how tremendously exciting N.W.A.’s music was, we get a sense of the times to which it was perfectly positioned to speak.

The screenplay (by Jonathan Herman and Andrea Berloff, with story credits for S. Leigh Savidge and Alan Wenkus) starts strong, digging into the group’s origin story. We first meet the ambitious young men, Ice Cube (played by his son, O’Shea Jackson Jr.), Dr. Dre (Corey Hawkins), Eazy-E (Jason Mitchell), Dj Yella (Neil Brown Jr.), MC Ren (Aldis Hodge) and The D.O.C. (Marlon Yates Jr.), in confrontations with cops who roll up threateningly. In our current climate of police brutality and racist practices, scenes of beatings, intimidations, and incarcerations are all the more electric. The movie opens on a raid, a militarized vehicle blasting open a drug house, the battering ram slamming into one of the occupants as Eazy-E, a low-level dealer, flees. Later, we see Cube, a sensitive poet, menaced by police, and Dre, an aspiring DJ, locked up for little more than throwing a single punch. Soon, they’re putting their creative energies together to cut a record, turbulent social energies feeding their expression.

These early scenes are the best, painting a vivid portrait of life in Compton as a group of charismatic young people hangs on the precipice of stardom. Soon, they’ve met a sleazy manager (Paul Giamatti) who promises riches. They record an album – 1988’s Straight Outta Compton, featuring hits like the galvanic “Fuck tha Police” – and head out on a whirlwind cross-country tour. Huge crowds flock to their concerts, while their music scares pearl-clutching pundits. It comes to a head in a terrific scene set in Detroit’s Joe Louis Arena where a crowd of white cops backstage warns N.W.A. not to play a certain song. Bet you can guess which one. They perform it, of course, and the crowd erupts. So do the cops.

For a while, director F. Gary Gray puts a little extra energy in this based-on-a-true-story form. Maybe it helps that he would’ve been around for some of it, what with his directorial debut being an Ice Cube video in 1993. He’s best known for low comedy (Friday) and slick thrillers (The Negotiator), and here plays to his strengths. With cinematographer Matthew Libatique, the look is sparkling and smooth. He makes scenes of hotel room parties and backstage antics sing with rambling raunchy camaraderie, while clashes with authority figures have a tense edge. There are plenty of interesting moments, compellingly acted, as the guys struggle to reconcile their individual priorities with the group’s dynamics. Cube goes solo, setting off a volley of diss tracks. Dre meets Suge Knight (R. Marcos Taylor), who is presented in a largely villainous light as he lures him into a new business partnership.

But in moving from their initial high-flying fame to the daily grind of managing relationships with business, the movie loses energy and novelty. Gray and his collaborators embalm recent history for preservation and praise, but not much in the way of narrative or cultural context. After the group hits big then falls apart, the movie becomes less a story and more a selection of biographical details, a collection of scenes in which characters and songs practically step out and get their own annotated introduction. For instance: “Who’s this guy?” one character will say, pointing at a new face. “That’s Snoop,” comes the answer, as Keith Stanfield steps in to play him for a scene and a half, rapping a few recognizable bars. How often can we watch scenes weighted with hindsight, nudging and winking at us to recognize famous lyrics, names, interviews, and catchphrases (“Bye, Felicia” shows up in an awfully belabored sequence)?

The movie starts strong and loses energy the more it becomes a predictable recitation of familiar biopic beats. Instead of digging into the lives of these men as characters, a rough and energized truth is sanded down to fit a commodified varnished version, comfortable and corporate. (Over the end credits, we practically get an ad for Beats by Dre.) Here’s a movie that lives moment by moment in an energetic novel space – the first sprawling rap history period piece – and adds up to a whole lot of unfocused familiar motions, reducing complicated real people into shiny pop symbols.

Crimes and Misbehaviors: IRRATIONAL MAN

Once you open the door to a little lie, you live in a world full of reasons to lie. At least that’s a philosophical perspective a depressed professor tries to explain early in Irrational Man, Woody Allen’s latest film. The academic doesn’t really believe it, and that’s not just because he disagrees professionally. He’s not sure he believes in anything at all, having a reached a point of real and deep psychological despair some point before arriving on campus to start his new teaching position during a sunny summer term. At the film’s core is this man’s search for meaning, a solution for his melancholy impotence, creative and otherwise. He finds it not in drinking or flirting with a pretty student, though they’re sickly good stopgaps, but by deciding suddenly and forcefully to commit a perfect crime. He thinks he's smart enough to get away with murder. Once he’s allowed himself to think about it, he’s in a world full of reasons to transgress.

This is hardly the first film from Woody Allen to consider existential crises, the cruelty of mankind, and the cold possibility of evil going unpunished. (See: Crimes and Misdemeanors, Manhattan Murder Mystery, Match Point, and so on.) But in the breezy drama he makes of it this time sits one of its bitterest expressions. Those interested in biographical criticism will surely find it noteworthy to point out that Allen made this film after renewed scrutiny on his personal life and alleged crimes. Irrational Man makes its professor a source of scorn and gossip, who clings to his sense of self-righteous self-justification, and who ultimately must pay for his hubris. If this is to be read as an expression of Allen, it’s a self-loathing statement. But it’s not a poisoned or stunted film. No, he’s up to his usual lively artifice.

Like so much of his recent output, the film plays like a draft, another sketch of ideas and themes he’s obsessively working over, varying the tone and plot, but flowing from a consistent voice. Here he is once more with the American songbook score, white Windsor font credits, and characters cloaked in the brisk patter of stuffy East Coast midcentury pseudo-intellectuals that maybe only ever really existed in this precise manner in the world of Woody Allen movies. Indeed, here the characters are signifiers in an intellectual exercise, but what a fascinating, dryly nasty little work this is. There’s an extra sting to thinly imagined characters as an expert cast enlivens arch wordiness and cinematographer Darius Khondji (in his fourth collaboration with Allen) creates bright tableaus pinning them in. The result is like a frustrated English major turned half-hearted gag writer punched up a minor forgotten Hitchcock concept.

What lets the picture breathe is ultimately the cold jazzy syncopation of dueling narrators, puncturing the depressed professor’s murderous ideas with the naïve beaming lights of a student. What starts as a typical vaguely queasy older man/younger woman relationship is played for its inappropriateness, and is made to seem wrong as a factor in the plot. We meet the man (Joaquin Phoenix, draining potential ticks from the dialogue with a flattened affect) as he arrives on campus just about ready to kill himself. The woman (Emma Stone, as cheerful as ever) is in his class, and responds eagerly to his praise. When they first embrace, Khondji finds them in the reflection of a funhouse mirror. There’s no denying the warped relationship now, especially as the clearly troubled man soon begins secret murder planning and everyone around the woman – her boyfriend (Jamie Blackley), parents (Betsy Aidem and Ethan Phillips), and chemistry teacher (Parker Posey) – advises her to keep her distance.

A key image is the film’s most striking shot. (It may very well be among the best shots in Allen’s career.) Phoenix stands at the end of a pier, the setting sun silhouetting him, reflecting off the water in a way that ripples his form. He looks like a ghostly shadow lurking in the middle of a picturesque landscape. He’s a figure unknowable, and as Stone questions how much she really understands about him, he grows all the more unspeakably creepy. By allowing us access to both character’s thoughts, we’re allowed full knowledge neither have. Their conflict, present even when neither is aware, gains an interesting friction. They arrive at logical conclusions for their situations, the film snapping shut with a clanging moral, neatly deployed. Philosophy in action, or philosophy inaction, leads them to unsettled conclusions, the sort of world-weary worldview of an old man who once thought his intellectual posturing could beat back despair but isn’t so sure anymore. Here’s a film that says the only rational philosophy is one that sees those who damage others fall to dooms of their own making.

Drift Away: RICKI AND THE FLASH

Ricki and the Flash is a humane family drama, warm and sympathetic, and without easy answers or cheap dramatics. It’s low-stakes and character-centric, attuned to relationships shifting slowly, in which an emotionally constipated family’s mostly buried grievances burble up and quiet back down again. When the credits roll, there’s no simple sense of closure. I don’t think this family has fully reconciled their disagreements, but I do believe they’re a little closer to happy than they were at the movie’s start. It’s comfortable mainstream entertainment smart about the way big life changes happen not through momentous milestones, but through small decisions that recalibrate mood and intention. Some of the characters are vaguely defined, and the ending is rushed, but there’s a solid center.

The film’s mostly focused on Ricki (Meryl Streep), a intermittently rude, barely solvent rocker who long ago was poised to be a Big Deal. Now she’s working in a grocery store by day, playing in a bar band, The Flash, by night. Decades earlier she left her husband (Kevin Kline) and children behind in the Midwest to pursue her rock and roll dreams in California. Ever since she’s been on the periphery of their lives, watching from afar as they’ve moved on while dreams of stardom passed her by. We see her getting some enjoyment out of playing with the band, filling a bar with the sounds of Tom Petty’s “American Girl” in the opening scene. But next, with a sarcastic look to her bandmate/hookup (Rick Springfield), she reluctantly launches into “Bad Romance,” tweaking her set in an obviously ill fitting attempt to stay relevant. An opportunity to regain her relevance as far as her family is concerned comes in the form of a bad-news phone call.

Her ex tells her their daughter (Streep’s actual daughter Mamie Gummer) is getting divorced, the husband having cheated. This left the young woman understandably distraught, so in flies Ricki to bring a mother’s touch to loosening depression. This causes all sorts of long-settled feelings of resentment, abandonment, and inadequacy to get unsettled once more. Ricki’s a source of well-intentioned messiness, an uneasy fit with a straight-laced family that has thrived without her. Though fighting, her daughter and ex find themselves reluctantly drawn into her charisma, while her other children (Sebastian Stan and Nick Westrate) and their stepmom (Audra McDonald) find themselves drawn into testy discussions. The family’s dynamics are sketched in with patient blocking and lengthy shots that breathe with the sweetly barbed dialogue.

Director Jonathan Demme is attuned to the hurt feelings behind their conflicts. But he’s most acutely aware of the issues of class at play. Ricki, a leather-wearing, heavily made-up bar singer, is on the precipice of declaring bankruptcy. She could barely afford the plane ticket. Meanwhile her bourgeois polos-and-khakis ex-husband’s incredibly successful job has gotten him a mansion so deluxe establishing shots could’ve been filmed at a golf resort. This contextualizes feelings, but Demme doesn’t denigrate any character or their position. No one is in the right, or in the wrong. He brings a collaborative spirit, allowing the actors a relaxed rhythm. It doesn’t have the snap of his early comedies (like 1986’s Something Wild) or the ensemble depth of his most recent family drama (2008’s Rachel Getting Married), but it has a comfortable feeling despite a screenplay that treats everyone as background to Ricki’s narrative.

Supporting characters are thinly developed, but filled with such pleasant, instantly appealing, performances. So good with what little they’re given, I wished Kline, Gummer, McDonald, and Springfield had more. They’re solid presences holding down predictable arcs, the better to draw attention to the character work Streep’s doing, I suppose. Screenwriter Diablo Cody shows fine detail in filling out Ricki’s life and the effect her decisions had on those around her, but also the ways in which she’s held to a double standard based on her gender. Cody’s writing typically shows a sharp observation of women’s lives. In Juno, Jennifer’s Body, and Young Adult we see specificity in varieties of female experience beyond typical Hollywood fare. That’s what’s best about Ricki and the Flash, in the end a small, sentimental, and even slight comic drama that isn’t nearly as interesting as an ideal confluence of its three main talents. (Demme, Cody, and Streep have all been better.) But it has a warm affection, inclusive and quiet, that puts it in a cozy place multiplex fare all too rarely finds. When Ricki steps on stage, able to express through her covers what she can't as herself, it hits all the right notes.

Give or Take: THE GIFT

Behind The Gift’s unassuming title is a tightly plotted thriller cannily hiding its darkest secrets until it’s too late to look away. It starts with cold trepidation and ends with upsetting nasty emotional wreckage. It lacks the complexity of superior thrillers, but maintains an admirable shiftiness throughout. Australian actor Joel Edgerton wrote and directed this, his first feature, and shows off fine dexterity in his filmmaking, sharp control over a devious slow build for an entirely non-supernatural horror film built on creepy uncertainties and scary implications inherent in human interactions. It traps three characters in a scenario of social awkwardness that grows icy and uncomfortable until there’s no way out that’ll spare all involved.

Edgerton, perhaps tired of the bland leading-ish man Hollywood has tried to force him to play (in forgotten roles in Warrior, The Odd Life of Timothy Green, or Exodus Gods and Kings, or even in good movies like The Great Gatsby or Zero Dark Thirty), here writes himself a choice supporting role as a real weirdo who makes life difficult for a married couple. They’ve just moved into a new town, the husband (Jason Bateman) taking a new job and the wife (Rebecca Hall) running her design business from their new home. It’s a shiny midcentury place with large glass windows forming an exterior wall, the better to be stalked in. When they run into one of the husband’s old high school classmates (Edgerton), he’s an overly ingratiating nice guy, welcoming them to the neighborhood and buying them housewarming gifts. There’s something off about him, the way he shows up unannounced and invites himself into their lives. He’s always around.

Soon details of the man’s story aren’t adding up and, freaked out, the couple breaks off contact. But then their dog goes missing, fish die, and mysterious messages appear. And of course those big glass windows aren’t helping calm fears of someone lurking on the margins of their lives, peeking in with who knows what thoughts running in his odd head. Edgerton makes smart decisions about when to cut into the perspective of which character, allowing us to watch Hall tremble into paranoia as their friendly stalker suddenly seems not so friendly, then Bateman as he blusteringly waves off his wife’s concerns. They’re frayed in ways revealing of their basest instincts, good and bad. We’re also eventually allowed a glimpse of the weirdo’s point of view, contextualizing his actions and directing attention to the sins so-called normal people get away with by using their averageness as cover.

Because the film approaches lurid subject matter with an eye toward the unsettling quotidian details of a person you’d rather not be around, Edgerton finds frightening ideas in simple things that can cause a person to freak out. There’s nothing quite so frightening as waking in the middle of the night to see a light on at the other end of the house, one you’d swear you’d switched off. Worse still, perhaps, is realizing someone’s been in your house, even though nothing appears to have been taken or destroyed. Edgerton’s camera finds typical suspense details like a glow at the end of a dark hall, a faucet running which wasn’t before, or a sudden appearance of an animal inside the frame, with a patient simmer. He lets the scares appear with a sense of effective rhythm, having slow cuts and precise focus pulls reveal dread.

Can you ever truly know anyone? That’s the age-old question The Gift confronts by shifting perspective subtly, revealing information to us only as certain characters discover it. As the plot heads away from what seemed in the opening scenes a predictable path, an evolving understanding of where the characters are coming from makes any chance for easy morality feel slippery. Who deserves comeuppance in this scenario? Who has done the most wrong? And do the ultimate victims deserve their fate? The questions remain tantalizingly unresolved. Ending on a note of slimy ambiguity, the movie questions the ultimate aims of any social interaction, especially in a world where so many may feel a little deception is reasonable to get what they want. It gets there through a disturbing twist, hinging on psychological damage (plus, most upsetting, the implication of even more depravity that may or may not have occurred, a nasty addition). Edgerton commits to seeing his chilling premise taken much further than you’d think it’d go.

Not So FANTASTIC FOUR

The third time attempting to make Marvel’s long-running comic Fantastic Four a movie franchise is not the charm. It almost works, starting as a straightforward attempt to situate fantastical developments within something like a real world. But by the end, it becomes merely a halfhearted and mediocre version of every CGI comic book slugfest we’ve ever seen. For most of its runtime, it’s a relatively low-key sci-fi drama about ambitious scientists whose work leads them straight into a body horror scenario. Its broad strokes are every superhero origin story. We meet some characters, watch them fall into a tragic moment that births their strange powers, and then let the effects of those powers lead them to do good. At least it starts from a place of awe about scientific discovery and nods towards serious contemplation about what it’d be like to suddenly wake up a freak. The follow through is what’s missing.

Opening moments play like slick speculative thriller, like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby rewritten by Michael Crichton. We meet a science prodigy, Reed Richards (played all grown up by Miles Teller). He’s out to make a teleportation device, recruiting a classmate, Ben Grimm (eventually Jamie Bell), to be an assistant, since the boy has access to a junkyard. Years pass. A government scientist (Reg E. Cathey) recruits Richards to assist on a top-secret teleportation project. The budding genius joins new peers Susan Storm (Kate Mara), Johnny Storm (Michael B. Jordan), and Victor von Doom (Toby Kebbell) in making his hypothesis a reality. This is what leads to the multidimensional gobbledygook and eventual mutation, turning Richards into a stretchy-limbed man, the Storms into an Invisible Woman and Human Torch, and Grimm ends up a lumbering, naked (although neutered) rock pile Thing. Doom disappears into green goo, but with a name like that, you’d know what he becomes even if there weren’t fifty years of comics pointing the way.

Setup is handled briskly with cinematographer Matthew Jensen’s nice industrial blue-and-gray palate and a pace set to ominous dread. The percolating score by Marco Beltrami and Philip Glass helps keep things on the edge of unsettling. Director and co-writer Josh Trank’s debut feature was Chronicle, the found-footage horror riff on superpower development. There he tapped into a feeling of teen angst and bullied vengeance, bending a metaphor around familiar tropes in some surprising ways. You can see in Fantastic Four a movement in that direction simply by how dourly and seriously he treats the concept despite how dutifully it hits origin story beats. He finds naturalism amongst the cast as the actors play real emotions instead of comic book posturing. Cathey has a gravely paternal countenance. Teller gives Richards a shy overconfidence, while Mara and Jordan share a relaxed sibling dynamic. Kebbell and Bell have intriguing inferiority and jealousies that dovetail. There’s enough there to wish there was more.

A better movie would flesh out these relationships, and turn their powers into more successful monster-movie metaphors. The central contraption sends off The Fly vibes. Yet by the time their powers are bestowed, the film’s decline has irreparably begun. There are initial creepy moments, as Teller sits with his limbs stretched unnaturally across a wide room, Jordan burns, Mara shimmers in and out of sight, and a boulder blinks with Bell’s eyes. But the movie is already poised to become something ordinary, turning characters’ sci-fi trauma into grist for the blockbuster mill. It’s obvious every moment of the narrative is dragging towards beats that must be hit. It’s not a matter of character or design, but rather corporate planning. The suits simply must have a recognizable superhero team before the end of the second act, no time to stop and linger in the material’s potential for character or ambiguity.

This Fantastic Four succumbs to achingly dull cliché so suddenly and incongruously, turning off the path of slow-burn characterization into stereotype in the blink of an eye. Character dynamics are no longer explored. Relationships are never satisfyingly resolved. Conflicts introduced between them are never teased out, instead foreshortened or forgotten. Themes of determination in the face of opposition and sacrifice in the name of science are thinned out and ultimately taken to dead ends. Everything initially intriguing about the movie is thrown out for the sake of yet another expensive movie ending with a bright blue beam of light zapping into the sky threatening to end the world. It goes from an admirable – and refreshingly different! – small-scale human-level superpower story to a big bland apocalypse. It’s almost as if it almost wasn’t a usual superhero movie and someone slapped together a new ending on the fly. Maybe that’s what actually happened.

I’m sure the inevitable behind-the-scenes tell-alls will be worth reading. Even if rumors of creative differences and a troubled production hadn’t leaked out over the course of its making, it’d be easy to tell the final product feels worked over, compromised. It starts as a slightly atypical look at overfamiliar material and ends abruptly as an underwhelming repetition of typical tropes. Without inside knowledge it’s hard to stand back and point out what to pin on Trank, and what to spot as contributions of co-writers Simon Kinberg and Jeremy Slater, not to mention any number of producers and creative consultants. No matter how it got there, what’s on the screen – obvious reshoots and all – lost my interest steadily as it became clear every avenue for drama, tension, and creativity was closed off to better streamline potential complexity into one quick, limp marketable action sequence. I don’t know if some hypothetical version of this movie would be better, but if it was doomed to fail, at least it could’ve failed interestingly.

Farm to Fable: SHAUN THE SHEEP MOVIE

Aardman helps keep the stop motion animation tradition alive with a distinct blend of expertly choreographed cartoon slapstick and dry British silliness unlike anything else in the family film marketplace. Their latest, Shaun the Sheep Movie, is a beautifully realized work of gentle tactile whimsy, like a big and delicate playset in which the most adorable toys act out appealing little comic dramas. The story concerns a little sheep named Shaun, first introduced in a Wallace and Gromit short before spinning off into his own cartoon series, hence the “movie” appended to the title here. Over the course of the movie, Shaun learns simple elementary kids’ movie lessons: teamwork, resourcefulness, courage, kindness, and appreciating loyal friends and family. It’s thin sweetness, but because the animators at Aardman are such geniuses at sight gags, layering the frame with funny details and staging briskly clever follies, it’s a constant joy.

The story is a simple “The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse” narrative, crossed with a reverse “Parable of the Lost Sheep.” Down on a farm in an English countryside, an agrarian paradise has become routine for the inhabitants. The farmer sticks to his schedule, and so do the animals, day after day feedings and washings and shearings happening so regularly you could set your clock to it. Shaun just wants a day off, so he convinces his flock to trick their kindly keeper into counting them, thus getting him to fall fast asleep. (Right away you get the level of humor at work here, which is partly a classic picture book technique working over common phrases and concepts in a wry way that anyone can enjoy.) Unluckily, an elaborate chain of unintended accidents leaves the farmer stranded in The Big City, a knock on the head making him an amnesiac. Not only can’t he get back to take care of his flock, he doesn’t even remember he should. It’s up to Shaun and his pals to head to the city and get their farmer back.

This simple idea is used to stage a silly city symphony, a light and amiable collection of inspirations (Tati’s Playtime, Miller’s Babe: Pig in the City, and the metropolis itself has to be named after Satyajit Ray’s The Big City) synthesized into a soft and colorful children’s entertainment. It’s an entirely non-verbal film, the animals and humans alike speaking in grunts, mutters, murmurs, muddy interjections, wordless shouts, and lots of baaing, of course. Following the flock as they meander down city streets (sometimes stacked on top of each other wearing long coats, the better to blend in), they find themselves in bus stations, fancy restaurants, junkyards, and other places with plenty of comic potential. We also meet dogs, ducks, and cats. They’re all trying to stay one step ahead of a cruel animal control employee. Meanwhile, the farmer bumbles around tying to regain his sense of purpose. And, back on the farm, the pigs have taken over the farmhouse (shades of Animal House).

Visual gags carry the day, writer-directors Mark Burton and Richard Starzak and their team of animators finding unexpected flourishes. They take obvious jokes (like an animal shelter full of critters inhabiting jailhouse stereotypes) a step farther, into delightfully weird images (recurring shots of a mean dog who silently stares with unblinking bloodshot eyes) that are then taken even one step farther, building a funny cutaway to a great payoff. You might expect three sheep to stack inside a coat to look vaguely human, but would you think they’d collide with two men inside a horse costume? That’s the sort of thing that’s so charmingly unexpected, and yet somehow perfectly understandable, it’s hard to resist.

Most unexpected, perhaps, is how sweetly touching it becomes without feeling sappy. Even though I was consistently entertained and found much to appreciate about its handcrafted qualities, I was nonetheless surprised how invested I became in the flock’s desire to be reunited with their farmer friend. It’s partly the fault of an original faux-Beach Boys song “Feels Like Summer” threaded throughout the film, in the opening where the baby sheep first meet their shepherd, then later a song they can sing together while lost, before finally playing triumphantly again once we reach the inevitable, but well-earned, happy conclusion. But it’s also in how immediately loveable Aardman can make these cartoon animals, in cute expressions and enjoyable antics. Their stop-motion style is instantly recognizable, and irreplaceable. We're lucky to have them.