Have you noticed that even as professional movie critics toss
well-deserved bouquets at Cars, the new animated film from
Pixar and Disney, many of them temper their praise with “yes,
but…”?
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times:
“The movie is great to look at and a lot of fun, but
somehow lacks the extra push of the other Pixar films.
Maybe that’s because there’s less at stake here, and no
child-surrogate to identify with.”
Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco
Chronicle: “In a way, ‘Cars’ can be regarded as an experiment,
to find out if a dramatic Pixar animation (albeit with a few comic
interludes) can work artistically. That remains to be seen, but I
think the relative failure of this movie can be measured in the
answer to this question: Who would you rather look at in a scene
about a young man’s education, Owen Wilson and Paul Newman, or a
computer drawing of a red and blue car? ‘Cars’ might get us into
car world as a gimmick, but it doesn’t get us into car world as a
state of mind. Thus, the animation, rather than seeming
like an expression of the movie’s deeper truth, becomes an
impediment to it.”
Brian Miller of Seattle Weekly: “Though
now the highest of high-tech computer animation companies, crown
jewel of the tarnished Disney bonnet, Pixar here gums up
the circuits of its latest model with too much
nostalgia…(snip) …When the camera pulls back to reveal
the old, gracefully meandering highway and the new, linear
interstate that replaced it, Hunt’s character tells Wilson, ‘Cars
didn’t drive on it to make great time. They drove on it to have a
great time.’ Their romantic drive together amounts to a Miyazaki
moment, a reconnecting with nature, and Wilson concedes, ‘It’s nice
to slow down once in a while.’ (Later, there’s even a sappy James
Taylor ballad mourning the loss of pre-Wal-Mart Main Street.)”
Note the tenor of the criticisms excerpted above. Everyone
agrees that Cars is entertaining and looks great, but —
these critics say — the movie either obscures deeper truth or
dwells too much on it.
A Freudian might suggest that these critics are children of the
Sixties who are ambivalent about the Fifties, but while there may
be something to a quip of that kind, it’s too facile by half. I do
think, however, that whatever their ages, the critics who take
shots at the nostalgia in Cars would look crossways at
nostalgia in any venue.
If you knew nothing else about a movie than that most of its
plot hinges on scenes in a town off Route 66 called “Radiator
Springs,” you’d guess that the film in question probably didn’t
involve an alcoholic detective’s search for a serial killer, or a
poster that screams “the next off ramp could be your last.” “Route
66” itself, the Mother Road, is a name to conjure with, far more so
than, say, Interstate 5. What Cars offers instead of
mayhem, deconstruction, and angst are lessons in character
development and coping with loss, which are good things to know
about.
Critic Brian Miller ties himself in knots because cars that
“stop to smell the roses” never leave the asphalt, and are thus
“implicated in the same modern sprawl that [director John] Lasseter
hates.” Meanwhile, Mick LaSalle wonders why the automobiles in this
movie without people have interiors, and speculates that it’s “for
no discernable reason, except maybe as some evolutionary holdover.”
Both men are missing the point — this is a movie (ostensibly)
about cars, but it’s made by and for people, and even a fantasy
world requires recognizable cues. With Cars, we actually
get more than that. Conservatives revere those parts of the past
that are worth celebrating, and so do the cars who’ve turned
Radiator Springs into a functioning if hardscrabble hamlet. That
James Taylor song to which Miller objects isn’t sappy; it’s
poignant.
Cars understands and shares the progressive mantra that
everyone is special, but not by suggesting equality of
outcomes: Lightning McQueen is demonstrably faster than most of the
other cars in the movie, including his “best friend,” Mater the tow
truck. But Mater, though drawn and voiced like the automotive
equivalent of a hayseed, is a perfect foil for the self-obsessed
race car. The tow truck has only one working headlight, but can
drive backward like nobody’s business. Ditto Ramone, the low-rider
voiced by Cheech Marin, who knows all there is to know about
automotive paint, Guido, the little tire changer, and Sally the
Porsche, who’s not just another pretty bumper. In other words, some
of these cars are in better shape than others, but all have a
certain dignity, prickly (like Paul Newman’s voicing for “Doc
Hudson”) or otherwise.
AS PIXAR FILMS GO, The Incredibles, with its ode to
marriage and family, was more recognizably conservative. It’s also
safe to say that Pixar meant neither The Incredibles nor
Cars as propaganda pieces in support of a particular
worldview. But there’s a reason why the relationship between Sarge
the Jeep and Fillmore the VW van plays more like the Odd Couple
than like the Hatfields and McCoys. The two vehicles run shops
right next to each other, with Sarge selling (what else?) military
surplus gear and Fillmore touting a custom blend of “organic fuel.”
In the movie’s one recurring joke, Sarge begins each day by raising
the American flag outside his shop to the loud, military-style
accompaniment of a bugle playing “reveille.” Five or six bars into
that, Fillmore opens his shop for business by cranking up the
famous Jimi Hendrix version of the Star-Spangled Banner on electric
guitar. Neither vehicle says “good morning” to the other. Instead,
Sarge yells “turn that junk down!” and Fillmore yells back that
“you gotta respect the classics, dude!” And the irony in the gag is
that both statements are fundamentally conservative.
Another theme in Cars is the idea that “it’s all about
the journey, not the destination.” A salute to that in tribal
memory is what makes Main Street anywhere more memorable than
interstate highways everywhere. But you don’t need a sheepskin from
UC Berkeley and a VW van in pastel colors to appreciate that
allegedly progressive aphorism. Francis of Assisi understood it
well, and Mother Teresa was fond of pointing out that “God doesn’t
call us to be successful; He calls us to be faithful.” Which, when
you think about it, is another way of saying precisely the same
thing.
Wonder of wonders, living with that attention to “the eternal
present” in mind tends to pay off in the future, too. If, like me,
you grew up thinking that misers like Ebenezer Scrooge were
conservative archetypes, you might be surprised to realize that
they aren’t. In fact, conservatives are more adept at recognizing
the value of the present moment than progressives are. Progressives
are fixated on the future by definition, else they wouldn’t forever
be “progressing” towards one utopia or another. Which brings us
back to the movie, because it’s only after a rookie race car (or an
unreflective human) learns that the journey matters, too, that the
destination (a Piston Cup, or heaven) means anything — and you
can’t get either one on your own. In short, there’s more going on
under the hood of Cars than Roger Ebert and his amen
chorus tend to see.
