By D.K. Holm
April 29, 2005
[nota bene: The following column, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending of the movies mentioned, don't read on.]
All Thumbs
THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
I have never read any of the Douglas Adams books, nor have I seen the TV show or heard the original radio series.
Therefore I am the perfect audience member, the perfect target for Buena Vista's adaptation of the first in the late Adams's HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE series. After all, if the studios kept catering onlyto the geeks and sci fi nerds they'd go out of business. No, they need to draw in the average American movie viewer, one who has a healthy interest in special effects, a sense of humor, and a taste for dry wit. People are more likely to watch movies than read books, so the studios have to lure in non-readers, and paradoxically they use the prestige of prior publication as a club.
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My esteemed colleague Matt Savelloni has already prepped MoviePoopShoot readers about the book; and M. J. Simpson has mounted an exhaustive attack on the adapters in his multipart critique that starts with page one here . Consequently, there is really no need for me to exhaustingly delineate the history of the HITCHHIKER universe and its numerous manifestations. I can deal with the movie as a movie, just as it was marketed to me.
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So as the film begins with one Arthur Dent (Martin Freeman of THE OFFICE) getting up in the morning, I could assess that passage for what it was: one of the two or three methods that filmmakers rely on to jump start their films (you have to hand it to LETHAL WEAPON II — it starts in the middle of a car chase). I could also notice that Dent's immediate problem, his house being targeted by the British equivalent of Robert Moses for destruction to accommodate a freeway, matches the whole planet's problem, that Earth has been singled out for annihilation to accommodate easier galactic flight.
Dent is approached by his close friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) who has big news to relate: A), that he is an alien, and B), he knows that the earth is about to be blown up.
Via Forward, Dent meets the President of the Galaxy, a vain and foolish fellow named Zaphod (Sam Rockwell, doing a Brad Pitt impersonation the way Depp drew from Keith Richards in CARIBBEAN). He also meets Trillian (Zooey Deschanel), the former Trish, a girl he met at a party and fell for but who now works for Zaphod. Much of the rest of the movie is concerned with the sexual rivalry between Dent and Zaphod for the attentions of Trillian.
Besides the theme of sexual dominance, the movie's plot imposes a couple of quests on the characters: Zaphod wants to gain wisdom from a giant computer oracle; and everyone has to rescue Trillian when she is captured by the hulking and bureaucratic Vogons. Meanwhile, Zaphod is also engaged in a political rivalry with Humma Kavula (John Malkovich), a religious leader who is half mechanical. He sends them all on a quest for a particular kind of gun.
Interspersed among these plot points are excerpts from the actual Hitchhiker's Guide, for which Ford is a researcher. These cartoon sequences can be funny. One just wishes that the movie as a whole were much more … fun. HITCHHIKER lacks bite, snap, edge, wit. Which is a big thing to say given that Adams is heralded as a premiere humorist in the Vonnegut mode. But as the film unfurls you keep thinking, Boy, what would Terry Gilliam have made of this.
Yeah, why didn't Gilliam direct this? He is almost over determined as a potential director for this project. Many of the elements of the film and therefore by inference from the books are very much in keeping with the tone of Gilliam's earlier films: the political satire, the bleakness, the decrepit Vogon bureaucracy; the oblivious sex object versus the ineffectual male; the episodic structure. Where is Gilliam when you need him — and when he needs a project just like this one?
I don't know any details about the production of HITCHHIKER but my guess is that even if they had thought of Gilliam as the natural helmer of this film they would have backed away from the thought for purely financial reasons. The director they got, Garth Jennings, a virgin movie director who previously made rock videos, must have come cheap. The cast is for the most part third tier. They may be appropriate for their characters (hard for me to say) but they don't jell as an ensemble, nor make the screen sizzle.
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Zooey Deschanel is cute enough, I guess. She has indie cred and may end up being the new Parker Posey, the ultimate indie girl actress. Her delivery and manner is very much of its time, and I can imagine her in a successful sit-com if such a project were carefully developed around her quirky personality and didn't sell out and become conventional. I mean, a very good sit-com could be done around the slacker-artist-rock band-coffee shop-gallery-'zine world, into which she fits vocally and visually. Here, basically, she doesn't even get enough screen time, or perhaps the right kind of screen time, or maybe she doesn't use well what's there.
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One of the big problems with the film is that the jokes, even when they are funny, aren't paced right, so that the moments of real wit slip past the audience. One gag that passes by too quickly concerns Humma Kavula. He leads a group of supplicants who express faith by sneezing — after which he says to the multitude, "Bless you." Another sly dig is that the form Zaphod signs to authorize Earth's destruction he thought came from an autograph seeker. Another is that Prefect, when Dent first saw him, was stepping forward to shake hands with a car because he thought it was the dominant life form. These are all intellectual jokes, really, verbal, or mental, not sight gags, and for some reason the film muffs each of them.
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Frankly, the trailer was better than the movie. I've had that experience before. I thought that SAVING PRIVATE RYAN the trailer was better than SAVING PRIVATE RYAN the movie. It summarized the final product well, hit the high points, and promised much. HITCHHIKER's trailer deconstructs trailers — the common voice, the accelerated editing, the bombastic music. It's funny and accurate and better then most everything in the subsequent film.
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I haven't read the books or heard the radio show but I probably will now, because friends have alerted me to what is probably the biggest difference between the movie and the source trifecta. It turns out that though the movie is British, it has been Americanized, i.e., all of Adams's sardonic comments about religion have been exorcised. His stance on organized religion sounds hilarious to me as summarized by friends, but the mass American market wouldn't tolerate attacks on its tolerance as Adams would be wont to do, so in this new repressive climate, Adams is reduced to the role of yet another goofy, apolitical broad British humorist.
What money the enterprise did have obviously went to the special effects. But surprisingly there aren't that many effects sequences in the film. I count about three major sequences that rely on special effects. The rest of the time the filmmakers use huge Jim Henson puppets that look like they could be computer generated, and skimpy sets that are sub-Gilliam. Don't be surprised if you feel taken for a ride.
And incidentally, if you are interested in KILL BILL, you might find my new book, KILL BILL: AN UNOFFICIAL CASEBOOK useful. It is now available in fine bookstores everywhere, or from Amazon.
NEXT TIME: MINDHUNTERS, more Asian action films, several STAR TREKS, and more!
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