The Wolfman remake, directed by Joe Johnston and
starring Benicio del Toro, Anthony Hopkins, Emily Blunt, and Hugo
Weaving, is a mostly faithful and sometimes worthy update of the
original, 1941’s Universal classic starring Lon Chaney, Jr. and
Claude Rains. The move alters a number of things, but the basic
story is the same: Lawrence Talbot (del Toro) returns to his
ancestral home in England after 20 years away upon learning of
the death of his brother, reconciles uneasily with his estranged
father (Hopkins), and deals with his cursed family history. Out
at night investigating his brother’s death, Lawrence is attacked
by a rampaging, wolf-like beast and wounded; most moviegoers can
guess the rest of it from here, and but for an unexpected family
back story, they’ll guess right.
In a sense, the predictability is refreshing, as it signals
the filmmakers’ desire to revive a genre, not cynically co-opt it
for other purposes. The film looks great: it changes the time
period from the 1940s to the 1890s, and the Victorian trappings
are perfectly suited to a story about curses and the
supernatural, and where most of the action takes place on the
fog-bound English moors. Del Toro is an appealing and convincing
successor to Chaney’s haunted Talbot.
As for the wolf himself, well, this is 2010: you can
imagine the effects will look pretty good, and they do, thanks to
famous makeup man Rick Baker, who also did An American
Werewolf in London. Baker is a longtime admirer of
Universal’s legendary makeup artist Jack Pierce, who
created and applied the iconic looks for Boris Karloff in both
Frankenstein and The Mummy and for Chaney in
The Wolf Man. Baker wanted to update that look, and when
you see his final creation you understand why he is regarded as a
modern master.
But during production Baker
complained that the filmmakers had decided to do
the transformation scenes — the highlight of any werewolf
picture, when viewers watch the character change from man to wolf
— in computer-generated imagery. Pierce, of course, did not have
access to CGI, and his transformation scenes required a
painstaking physical process. Baker wanted to make an attempt at
emulating that effort. But the film’s real sin in the use of CGI
is not so much in the transformation scenes as in the action
scenes, when the wolf man catapults around like a superhuman
creature. All is thunderous movement and blinding speed and
improbable leaps in the air, including leaps between buildings in
an urban scene that makes one think he is watching
Spiderman with fur.
In this regard The Wolfman becomes the latest
entry in the long-running trend to make all such fantasy films
into superhero movies. I suppose the reason why the superhero
approach always wins out is simple enough — it’s popular; in
other words, it pays — but maybe someday a director will create
a monster who, while no longer an ordinary man, is still subject
to the mortal world that the rest of us inhabit. Most of that
nuance is lost in The Wolfman and other films of this
kind.
Nuance is also thrown to the winds when it comes to the
film’s depictions of violence, which revels in ripped flesh and
blood, relying on sensory assault to do what suspense and
character development did in the days before computers made us
all lazy.
But there are other aspects to like. The movie achieves one
fine moment of tension in its most memorable scene, which also
seems a sly homage to King Kong. Lawrence, who by now
has been institutionalized, is wheeled into a medical class,
strapped to a wheelchair, to demonstrate that his lycanthropy is
an illusion from which he has been cured by psychological
counseling (which in truth consists of brutal and sadistic
torture, including a submersion treatment that seems a clear
allusion to waterboarding). But as the audience knows, Lawrence’s
problems are not in his head. The scene has the same
kind of churning tension and cathartic violence as the scene in
King Kong when Kong breaks
out of his shackles on a New York stage.
Director Johnston clearly reveres the Wolf Man
original (if not 1935’s
Werewolf of London, the genre’s true
ancestor, though it’s mostly forgotten now). He’s brought back
the gypsies who played such a key role in the 1941 film, and
though there is no one to fill Maria
Ouspenskaya’s shoes as Maleva, the old woman who sees
Talbot’s fate clearly, Geraldine Chaplin (daughter of Charlie)
does a solid enough job reprising the role. The remake even
features torch-bearing bands of men on the hunt for the monster,
a staple of the old Universal films. That one detail alone put me
in a forgiving mood.
The Wolfman is also blessedly free of
the kind of ironic mockery that so many remakes of old classics
seem unable to resist. There are no wolf jokes, no agitprop
feminist characters comparing lusty men with ravenous beasts;
even the Talbot family dog is principally used to illustrate the
changes in Lawrence, not to provide a canine comic foil. In fact,
The Wolfman’s very earnestness, as refreshing as it is,
may have met its match in the ironic consciousness of today’s
audience. Throughout the movie, we hear the distinctive wolf howl
echoing across the desolate moors; this works well so long as we
don’t see the wolf man doing it. But when we do — and again,
it’s in that urban scene, where the trappings are all wrong —
it’s hard to suppress a chuckle or the suspicion that one has
stumbled onto an excellent beer commercial.
Irony really is this culture’s silver bullet, against which
even well-meaning tribute can only defend itself so much.
