Like so much else, the servant who is wiser than his master goes
back to Cervantes. Sancho Panza is to Don Quixote as Figaro is to
Count Almaviva as Jeeves is to Bertie Wooster. It was all very
amusing up until half a century or so ago, but nowadays it would be
almost impossible for a fictional servant not to be wiser
than his master. The savor has almost gone from one of the
longest-running jokes of European culture. But Nick Park has given
it a new lease of life by breaking through the species barrier in
his wildly successful but short "claymation" films starring the
cheese-loving inventor Wallace (voice of Peter Sallis) and his
faithful dog Gromit. All three previous installments, A Grand
Day Out (1989), The Wrong Trousers (1993), and A
Close Shave (1995), were nominated for Oscars, and the last
two won. Now at last Wallace and Gromit come to the big screen and
at feature length in Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the
Were-Rabbit. Fans of the work of Mr. Park and his Aardman
Animation Studios -- which also produced Chicken Run
(2000), an earlier collaboration with DreamWorks -- will
rejoice.
The advantage of making the wise servant a dog is that the
master doesn't have to be either delusional, like Don Quixote, or
arrogant and self-important, like Beaumarchais's Count Almaviva, or
bird-brained like P.G. Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster. Wallace is none
of these things, merely an otherworldly inventor who lacks the
common sense of his dog. The earlier films established that
Gromit's canine intuitiveness does not interfere with his ability
to keep up -- aided by a fat tome titled "Electronics for Dogs" --
with Wallace's ever more fantastical, Rube Goldberg-like
inventions. He must understand Wallace's business as well as his
own in order to anticipate where and when Wallace will overreach
himself, as he invariably does.
Lady Tottington (voice of Helena Bonham-Carter) is Wallace's
love interest in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and she
brings with her an element of that favorite British subject, social
class. She asks for Wallace and Gromit's "Anti-Pesto" company's
help in dealing with an infestation of rabbits, which are also
plaguing all the vegetable gardeners in their generic Northern
English village -- which seems to be just about everyone in it.
Wallace is too earnestly middle-class himself not to be impressed
by the summons to Tottington Hall, where there is soon to be a
contest between the growers of giant vegetables. "We're going up in
the world," he proudly announces to Gromit. But his humane -- and
very funny -- methods of bunny-removal are soon clashing with the
more traditional approach, represented here by a bald and brutish
but aristocratic rabbit shooter called Victor Quartermaine (Ralph
Fiennes). Lady Tottington's tenderheartedness to her bunnies makes
her into a kind of reverse Dulcinea to the more forward-looking
Wallace, since instead of being a scullery-maid who is taken for a
noblewoman, she is a noblewoman who has the sentimentality of a
scullery-maid. Besides, she says, "Victor has never shown any
interest in my produce."
The theme of class is thus quickly dissolved in a
straightforward rivalry between the two men for the lady's
affections, which are never really in doubt. You would think that
Gromit, being a dog and therefore designed by nature to hunt and
kill things, would be more sympathetic to the aristocratic view of
nature as red-in-tooth-and-claw. But the most brilliant thing about
Gromit is that his doggy nature is entirely taken up by his loyalty
to Wallace. And Wallace needs every bit of it when, as usual, he
goes too far and invents the Mind-o-Matic, which "extracts unwanted
thoughts and desires." His purpose is to brainwash the captured
bunnies into not liking vegetables -- so that they can then be
released back into the wild without any fear of destroying the
village's produce. (What Wallace imagines the rabbits will eat
instead is never mentioned.) In trying the machine out, he finds --
as, of course, it is inevitable he should find -- that instead of
making the bunnies turn up their noses at vegetables, he has
produced a giant and hideously destructive half-man, half-rabbit.
Only by Gromit's keeping his head can he be saved from attack by an
angry mob of vegetable growers who think that Anti-Pesto has let
them down.
The comic invention with which the story is told is as rich and
intricate as it is in the earlier Wallace and Gromit films, though
here there is a bit more of the Hollywood-style post modern touch,
as the film sends up old-fashioned horror flicks and King
Kong, among other movie allusions. At one point the village's
vicar, the Reverend Clement Hedges (Nicholas Smith) gathers the
frightened villagers in the church to warn them that "by tampering
with nature, we have brought a terrible judgment on ourselves" as
ominous organ music plays in the background. Then the vicar turns
toward the organ loft, where we see the organist hard at work, and
says with annoyance, "Give over!" It's impossible not to be charmed
by this gentle, self-deprecating humor -- as when over the closing
credits the now standard disclaimer about how "no animals were
harmed in the making of this picture" is toyed with in a comically
original way.
The trouble is that it's too true. Neither the animals, nor the
people, nor the monsters in this film come to any harm. Even
cartoon killing is eschewed. It's a reminder of the essential
unseriousness of the postmodern style, of which The Curse of
the Were-Rabbit may one day be looked upon as the crowning
achievement. Mr. Park has also learned from Cervantes the
mock-heroic, and much of the film's effect is produced by the comic
contrast between two knights jousting over a fair damsel -- while
their dogs "dogfight" in fairground airplanes -- and the everyday
world of cheese and giant vegetables and cotton candy in the midst
of which the contest takes place. But it is Cervantes without the
cruelty and heartbreak that bring it back to reality, and I can't
help feeling that, good as the movie is, it is missing something
essential by leaving these things out.
topics:
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