The Ottery
“If an otter can’t have fun doing something, it just simply won’t do it.”

Meandering through Jungles with Steve Carell: Horton Hears a Who and Dan in Real Life

April 20th, 2008

Sort of by accident, I saw two movies this weekend starring Steve Carell (or at least his voice): Dan in Real Life (on DVD) and Horton Hears a Who (still in theaters, if only because parents are desperate to take their kids to anything animated). Both movies are flawed, though this has little to do with Carell and quite a bit to do with the screenwriters.

First of all, Horton Hears a Who suffers from the overabundance of famous comedian voices and self-conscious pop-culture references that has plagued animated features since Aladdin. But, perhaps influenced by my dear Porpoise—for whom there is no plot-sin worse than a diversion that sidetracks the characters, only to have them return to exactly the same spot where they were before the diversion—I felt like the film introduced plenty of unnecessary obstacles into Horton’s quest to find a safe spot for the tiny world of Whos that he’s discovered on a speck.

Horton’s main adversary, the sour Kangaroo of the jungle of Nool, is rather inexplicably outraged by Horton’s belief in the people on the speck. She declares, “If you can’t see it, hear it, or feel it, it doesn’t exist”—and, in other parts of the movie, she voices concern that Horton will lead the children to use their imaginations. More entertaining than the movie is a quick glance through online reviews that try to interpret the ideological stance of the Kangaroo. Her insistence on empirical evidence means that she’s anti-religious (which, you know, is the same thing as liberal), but she also “pouch-schools” her joey rather than trusting him to Horton’s tutelage, so that must mean that she’s—gasp—a fundamentalist!

Or maybe she’s just a Kangaroo, brought into her confused and confusing existence by desperate screenwriters. In an improbable stretch, she consults a buzzard named Vlad, apparently a representative of the Russian mafia within the jungle of Nool, and enlists his help to destroy the clover upon which Horton claims the speck exists. Enter chase scene with buzzard and elephant. When this fails, the Kangaroo rounds up the other jungle creatures to go after Horton, and they’re amazingly willing to turn into an angry mob. Yet, once the mob is pacified, once the Whos have proved their existence, and once both Horton and the Kangaroo have been reintegrated into the community, the clover and its accompanying speck still haven’t reached their destination. There’s little worse than a series of improbable, unwarranted conflicts followed by an incomplete resolution.

The Whoville portions of the story are more interesting and entertaining, though I agree somewhat with the reviewers who have complained that the Mayor’s one son, rather than any of his 96 daughters, is treated with importance and deemed worthy of finally saving the day. I don’t think the gender bias was intentional—silent son JoJo comes across as the animated version of Paul Dano’s Nietzsche-loving teen from Little Miss Sunshine—but I do think the story could have placed one of the daughters (a shy daughter who feels ignored) in the same role, with less problematic implications.

The failure to explore the girls’ story actually bothers me more in Dan in Real Life. Dan—like the Whoville Mayor, played by Steve Carell—is that most hallowed of movie stock characters: the widower father. If that’s not enough to make us feel sorry for him, the fact that two of his three daughters are teens should do the trick.

The movie seems to realize that it needs to do something to make Dan’s character more three-dimensional, but in trying to give him depth, the screenwriters can’t seem to decide how likable he should remain. We’re clearly supposed to like him, but it’s hard to extend that grace to a father who’s so unreasonable that he won’t let his 17-year-old daughter drive, not even with him in the car.

Dan does get to experience a moral quandary when he falls for his brother’s girlfriend. The quandary is heightened by his realization that his brother, something of a ne’er-do-well, genuinely cares for Marie. Unfortunately, the movie never deals satisfactorily with this complication—unfortunate, because this is one thing that could have raised it above the level of a predictable romantic comedy.

Another potential saving grace would have been giving us a little more insight into why Marie decides that Dan is her soul mate. We know hardly anything about her, except that she’s been plunked into this terribly uncomfortable family reunion—and that she makes good pancakes. In other words, she’s mostly a plot device, as are Dan’s three daughters. The one that wants to drive gets to reflect ironically on her father’s getting his license revoked, the one that wants to date gets to reflect ironically on her father’s recklessness-for-the-sake-of-love, and the one that wants attention gets to look cute and sad. Yet none of this irony (apparently the sole purpose for which the daughters’ characters exist) even translates into any character growth for Dan.

If I had to weigh the two movies against each other, I’d say Dan in Real Life is better, because, though it’s flawed, you actually do care about the characters. You care enough about the movie to want it to be better. Horton is just a big, tangled mess—a pretty mess, but a mess all the same. Let’s hope that Steve Carell’s next project, Get Smart, is less convoluted.

In conclusion, may I make the completely irrelevant comment that I would pay good money to see something called Horton Hears Doctor Who?

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