Poor
Brave. It could have survived, and thrived, as just an animated family-friendly
adventure movie. Instead, it has to be a Pixar movie, and not just a Pixar
movie, but the Pixar movie that had to come out right after Cars 2 and prove one
of two things, according to your tastes: either that Pixar had regained its
footing after one and only one (but one rather large) artistic stumble, or that
Pixar has officially settled into its role as a more technically accomplished
marketing department for the Walt Disney Company to sell toys. Thus it it has
gotten stuck in the one place that "awfully nice and deeply felt and
extravagantly damn pretty but also a bit simplistic and certainly not a
medium-defining masterpiece" could not survive being stuck, and so we've arrived
at a place where nobody can bring themselves to simply talk about the film on
its own terms, but only as a moment for reflection on the state of a studio that
was, in very recent memory, the most reliable brand name in the modern history
of Hollywood. And, heck, if I were all that concerned about this trend, surely I
would have started my own review any other way. At the very least, this much has
to be said, and said loudly: there is absolutely no excuse for considering Brave
to be predictable or redundant or a sign of creative failure at a time when
Madagascar 3 has opened to generally positive reviews.
The film was conceived by Brenda Chapman some years ago as an attempt to work
out her feelings about motherhood, making this the first female-centric Pixar
film not just in that it has a girl protagonist, but in that its themes and
perspectives are somewhat more feminine than the rip-roaring boy's own
adventures that have made up the bulk of the studio's output to this point, and
also, depending on how you want to parse out a very knotty production history,
it's the first Pixar film to have a woman share directorial duties, though the
truth of this matter is hidden beneath some very defensive official credits:
Mark Andrews and Chapman each get their own separate "directed by" card, with
Steve Purcell receiving one of those "co-director" credits Pixar is so fond of
that I've never entirely understood. And the screenplay is credited to Andrews,
Purcell, Chapman and Irene Mecchi, in exactly that order with exactly those
commas. So whatever the hell happened (Chapman was at one point said to have
been taken off the project entirely owing to all-encompassing "creative
differences", which many of us supposed to mean that Pixar is still something of
a boys' club), Brave is not necessarily a movie that, in its current state, has
a single artistic vision backing it up, and this might be all the reason that it
can't muster itself up to the studio's top tier, quality-wise. For there is,
alas, no denying that the movie takes an awfully long time finding a tone that
it wants to stick with, and so we have broad physical comedy matched with
winsome, sugary sentiment and vigorous swashbuckling, with all of it playing
against the backdrop of fantastic mythic adventure, and the marriage of all
these different modes is nowhere remotely near as effortless as the comic/tragic
slurry of Toy Story 3 or the adventure/domestic drama of
Up, for example.
That said, Brave is still very much about one thing, and that thing is still the
central concept that Chapman first had in mind: the difficulties of a
mother-daughter relationship. Not a subject that gets much airtime in American
cinema, to say nothing of American cartoons for the broadest possible audience.
The film takes place in Scotland sometime in the early Middle Ages, though it
pointedly doesn't make precise dating possible (references to Viking raids
suggest the 8th or 9th Century, the inevitably omnipresent kilts would make it
the 16th), where several local clans have been united under the throne of King
Fergus (Billy Connolly, almost as inevitable as the kilts). At this time, the
king's daughter, Merida (Kelly Macdonald) is just about at the right age to be
married off, and Fergus and his domineering wife Elinor (Emma Thompson, stealing
the whole movie as a voice just as thoroughly as she does in live action) have
arranged that it shall be to one of the lords whose fealty to Fergus's crown is
never more than tenuous at best. Merida, however, has absolutely no interest in
being told what to do just because she's a princess, and from there, well...
It's a princess movie, all right, but complaints of Pixar taking marching orders
from its marketing-crazed overseers at Disney are wildly misplaced. For one,
Chapman's central idea has its genesis in the 2005-2006 corridor when relations
between the two companies was at its lowest. And two (owing perhaps in part to
one), Brave is in its way as much of a challenge to the Disney princess paradigm
as DreamWorks Animation's Shrek franchise, albeit from a considerably different
angle. For while the central motif of the Disney princess film that Disney wants
you to think about is "headstrong girl wants to forge her own path", a much more
suitable candidate is "headstrong girl falls madly in love with a cardboard
prince and abandons her entire history in order to attain him" and in this,
Brave could not be a stronger or more pronounced kiss-off to the corporate
overlords. There is not a whisper of hetero normative pair-bonding in the
conclusion to Brave's drama; not only does Merida end up quite single and quite
happy about it, she's managed by the end to convince the rest of the cast that
she's absolutely in the right for it. No indeed, the central dynamic here is
mother and daughter, to the active exclusion of everything else.
Given that change, sure, the plot dynamic is roughly the same, marrying the
Disney princess formula to the Pixar adventure formula with uncertain results -
it requires two separate climaxes, one emotional and one physical, and the
second of these doesn't feel as well-earned as it might - but whatever
combination of Andrews, Chapman, and Purcell is responsible for pacing does a
nice job of keeping the pace quick and the energy high without ever dropping
into mania; by the time the mid-film plot twist shows up (a good one, and not
exactly a surprise, but since the convention has emerged that we treat it as a
spoiler, I will mention only that it ties Brave in with traditional European
folklore in a manner that I find to be spectacularly effective, while also
giving Julie Walters a terrific cameo as a bear-obsessed witch and woodcarver),
the film seems to have just barely started, and it ends long before it starts to
strain even with its tonal inconsistencies and duplicate climaxes. It's a
gleefully entertaining adventure movie, in short, and what it lacks in cunning
it makes up for in sincerity and crisply defined but still archetypal central
characters.
There is, at last, the issue of how the thing looks, which is: nothing short of
lovely. Catch me in a good mood, and I'd call it the most straight-up gorgeous
animated movies ever; in a more objective state, I would see fit to drop it
below The Lion King and a handful of Studio Ghibli pictures, at least. But we're
still talking top-shelf, "oh my God, that is beautiful" design and animation
here: the Scottish Highlands are one of those locations impossible to screw up
on film, and that apparently extends to the Scottish Highlands as rendered in a
computer as well, or at least the Pixar computers that have in the past few
years hit the point where it seems that human imagination, and not technical
proficiency, is the only limit to how amazing their films can look. Brave
doesn't push the bar for the studio (though if there's any farther for the bar
to go after WALL·E, I can't imagine where that might be). We have all the usual
suspects: fog-shrouded standing stones and deep green valleys, profoundly grey
stormy skies and burning sunsets that make your eyes water with pleasure
(Danielle Feinberg, Pixar's in-house lighting specialist, remains one of the
studio's great assets who never gets her due, probably because "director of
photography" is a weird and counter-intuitive credit in animation). That plus
the excellent character design - only Pixar's second human-driven movie after
The Incredibles, Brave doesn't up the realism from that film so much as
re-direct the style into something softer and paler, everything round where The
Incredibles was supremely angular - and we have a movie that is wonderful to
look at and behold, from the sun glowing on Merida's out-of-control red hair to
the show-offy rainstorm that is one of the best things I've seen in 3-D all
year. And sure, maybe it's more beauty for beauty's sake than beauty that
necessarily contributes to the film's narrative, but I have long since reached a
point where a movie that makes my breath stop because of how damned lovely it is
not something I care to take for granted. At the end of the day, Brave is akin
to the straight-A student getting a B.
My quick one word review of the Pixar short subject La Luna that precedes Brave:
sublime. |