62. Pulling a Boner

One of the first blogs I posted on this site was on Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985). I will indulge and quote myself at length:

"[Pee-Wee's Big Adventure is] completely irresistible to some obsessive part of my brain that feels perfection just enough out of reach that it may as well be at the other end of the universe, or of life; exciting with the shivery frisson of recognition of some half-buried desire; completely innocent in its exploration of the loss of innocence, its post-something wink at everything I'd forgotten about the solitary moments of childhood, in which I held the world I'd invented close to my face so that the other one could fade away; and of course exploding with the joy of self, in which the tiniest bite of cereal is savored, because you can hold your own spoon now."

I could write that about any number of Tim Burton movies, in particular Beetle Juice (1988), Batman (1989), Edward Scissorhands (1990), Ed Wood (1994), Big Fish (2003) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), not to mention his work with Henry Selick, The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and James and the Giant Peach (1996). And while one might argue that every Tim Burton movie is a guilty pleasure, I must admit to particularly savoring the indulgences of Batman Returns (1992) and Mars Attacks! (1996), two recklessly jerry-rigged collages that insist they're comedies, classy as a sequin'd tarantula.

At his most dedicated, Burton spins and fingerpops his way through the deep recesses, cracking wise like a cathartic whip. And it seems his most constant companion in this is Johnny Depp, who, in four movies with Burton, seems more than willing to play--and to do so unsupervised, like Pee-Wee, allowing for the kind of unembarrassed foolishness found only in one's unconscious, a hyper kid who leaps into the frame and makes a welcome mess of things. This kind of madness is good for you, a free space where the grappling outbursts of childhood finally have the room to mean something beyond the hints offered by the dim, isolated images of our past. At least mine: Burton/Depp lets me know it's perfectly fine that I'm always wanting to be eight, alone in the backyard and spinning around, just because. Like Wordsworth says, that kid is my dad.

So what went wrong with Corpse Bride (2005)? It had Depp, it had the means to erase inhibitions offered by animation, it even had a patented Charles Addams sensibility to open the creaking door to all kinds of mischief. In other words, why wasn't it The Nightmare Before Christmas? I won't go all the way with this, but maybe it was the absence of that stop-action pinwheel, Henry Selick. Now, he may not have been absolutely necessary--Johnny can gibber and squeak all on his own, acting the way Donald O'Connor danced, with gravity-defying floats and flips. (Digressive) case in point: Despite my better judgment, I am always mesmerized by Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)--although that may be due to the presence of yet another unhinged hotfoot, Terry Gilliam--but I'll save that for another day. The thing is, I was certain that Depp and Burton would give us more in Corpse Bride than we got.

Again, perhaps what it needed was Selick's apparent willingness to coast right up to the edge of a sticky "13," ready-made to slap itself onto the heel-end of the movie's "PG," to tear at the cowardly membrane of the superego and let the id come out and play. True, it almost gets there: Helena Bonham Carter's Bride is at once noisome and voluptuous, her figure reminiscent of Lisa Marie as both the Martian hooker in Mars Attacks! and Vampira in Ed Wood; and the dead are at times happily ghastly--there's some slippy-sloppy fun with the guy who splits in two--and one can never go wrong with a Peter Lorre maggot. But it stops short of Pee-Wee's joy--or Nightmare's gothic glee. I am compelled to bring up Monkeybone (2001), Selick's Cool World-ish Freudian pratfall that tosses Brendan Fraser--the beefy Depp?--into That Which Is Unconscious and shakes the cocktail, drunk with its own lubricious abandon. OK, so it takes advantage of its PG-13 like a drunken fratboy; but also consider Nightmare Before Christmas, with its own creepy-crawly disregard for restraint--just like Pee-Wee and Charlie. So Monkeybone does not have to be the acid test for this kind of thing--although in its zippy, hubba-hubba horny way, it revels in its commitment to a netherworld. Corpse Bride refuses to go all out, except for selected moments, such as the dancing skeleton song--which I will admit flips its lid--with ample help from Danny Elfman, turning and turning in his usual happy-go-wacky and widening gyres. But Depp remains sotto voce, the photography is too-often murky, and the plot plods. A vita more acido than dolce, despite its alluring allusions.

Perhaps I wanted too much: the movies as Freudian dream, wish-fulfillment with puppets; or perhaps the movie I wanted has already been made by these folks, any number of times. So maybe Corpse Bride isn't so much disappointing as unnecessary--like Burton's Planet of the Apes (2001), despite its own moments of giddy excess. Or maybe it's just me again, in the mood for Principles built on Pleasure, wanting to see a movie willing to go skidding on an oily, banana-shaped peel, in a world where a cigar is never just a cigar. Say: I may have been asking this of the wrong movie: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit--one of the Oscar wins that made sense this year--may have been the answer all along; after all, as it so pointedly warns us, it "may contain nuts."