The Squeak Shall Inherit The Earth

“I don’t think we’re dealing with an ordinary mouse.” ~ Ernie Smuntz

“She just showed up at the factory, took off her coat, and begged me to take her. We made love in a way that I’ve only seen in nature films.” ~ Lars Smuntz

“See, most people aren’t what I call... psychologically equipped to catch a mouse. But you spend a few days getting into his furry little head, you know how to find him, figure out his moves, and then...pow! One dead mouse.” ~ Caesar

“Well, look at him. He’s pathetic.” ~ Lars 

“Pathetic? He’s Hitler with a tail! This is The Omen with whiskers! Nostradamus couldn’t have seen this thing coming!” ~ Ernie

In 1997, director Gore Verbinski brought Mousehunt to the big screen, a slapstick black comedy that plays like a live action Looney Tunes film or an extended Laurel & Hardy tale, with two dimwits trying to chase down an infuriatingly hard to kill mouse in an old house. The film definitely goes big for the laughs, setting up sight gags and intricate set pieces in a way that really pays off, leaving the audience highly amused and wondering just what can possibly go wrong next. Taking place at an indeterminate time in the 20^th century (the styles and vehicles evoke eras from the 40s to the 70s), the movie is uproariously funny and devious in its execution.

The film opens with the death of a one-time string magnate, Rudolph Smuntz (William Hickey), who leaves his dilapidated factory and a ramshackle mansion out in the countryside to his sons Ernie (Nathan Lane) and Lars (Lee Evans). Lars gets thrown out by his wife April (Vikki Lewis) who’s infuriated by his refusal to just sell out the factory. Ernie, a chef and restaurant owner in town has a bad night when the mayor and his family dine in and the mayor ends up dying- an event triggered by one lone pest in the establishment. Ernie’s restaurant is shut down, and Ernie finds himself on the skids, just like his brother.

They find their way to the old mansion, which has the look of something out of a Gothic horror story, and which already has a resident- a resourceful little mouse. The brothers discover the mansion is a lost masterpiece designed by an architect who went crazy, and learn there’s quite a market for people who’d want to buy the place. All they have to do is some renovating and sprucing things up... and get rid of that mouse. Which of course is easier said than done.

Adam Rifkin wrote the story and screenplay, which really does have the mood of a cartoon. It’s cleverly written (albeit with protagonists who are both idiots), with a rich sense of humour and a breezy pace. There are things done through the film that a person couldn’t possibly survive- being blasted out of a chimney high in the sky and crashing into a frozen lake, for instance- and yet in the cartoon world, one can get away with that. The story asks us to accept protagonists who are essentially filling the roles of Yosemite Sam and Elmer Fudd- morons who should have more sense to know when they should just walk away, but don’t- and the way they’re written, the audience gets great laughs at their expense. Even the mouse, which survives things it shouldn’t, and does things a mouse shouldn’t be capable of, seems larger than life- is it a demon? Or the ghost of the mad architect come back to life?

Verbinski’s directing keeps the film going along smoothly. Years later he would end up directing the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise and The Lone Ranger- to the point where I think he needs to retire, or at least take a few years off (it seems he’s not doing so). In this case, he shot the film in the eccentric style you’d expect of him- sometimes from the point of view of the mouse in the walls of the mansion, other times much work goes into grandly conceived mousetraps that go horribly (and hilariously) wrong, and Verbinski sets all that up in just the right way as to how he films it.

His crew did good work in their own ways. I like the look of the mansion- creepy and foreboding at night, but with a different mood in the daytime, and that reflects well on set design. I also like that the sense of timing is indeterminate, with the mood of the film, the clothing and the props incorporating a variety of time periods in the mid-20^th century. Lastly, I really love the score by Alan Silvestri, which incorporates soft and amusing themes (quite appropriate for the mouse, for instance) before turning those themes loose, giving them a building, relentless energy, and driving up the sound to accompany scenes where mousetraps go wrong- best demonstrated in the sequence in which the mouse dispatches of the exterminator.

The casting is brilliant, starting with the smaller roles. Maury Chaykin, who often played grandiose and larger than life roles, plays that again here as Alexander Falko, an eccentric tycoon who collects homes built by the late architect Charles Lyle LaRue simply because he likes them (a rather expensive hobby). Michael Jeter, the character actor who always seemed like he could get blown over by a stiff breeze, plays the heritage expert Quincy Thorpe, another eccentric who thinks the world of LaRue designs.

This was the last film for William Hickey, who had a long career but late in the game became known for playing cranky or off kilter old men. Rudolph Smuntz is another example of that- quite off kilter, and while the character dies early on, his presence is felt through the rest of the film, particularly in the form of a portrait with a constantly changing facial expression.

Vicki Lewis is a delight as the greedy wife April, irritated by her moronic husband’s foolishness. She’s a whole lot smarter than he is, to be certain, and opportunistic- she’s a character one wouldn’t trust for a minute, and yet Lewis has fun with her, and that comes through in the way the audience responds to her.

Christopher Walken’s made a career out of playing eccentrics and oddballs, and here he gets to play Caesar the exterminator in that fashion. Caesar’s not playing with a full deck of cards when we first meet him- the way he talks about his work, it’s like Hemingway on hunting with a side order of insanity. Caesar seems to think that to kill the pest, one must think like the pest- one wonders if he’s inhaled too much bug spray. It’s a loopy character- and watching him underestimate his mousy quarry is hilarious.

Lee Evans has spent most of his career as a British stand-up comedian, with a gift for slapstick humour and energetic physical comedy. He brings that to the role of Lars, an idiot who accepts he’s an idiot, and the way he approaches the role reminds me of Dick Van Dyke, who also had a gift for physical pratfalls. Lars is an affable sort of fellow, has more of a conscience than his brother, tends to be slow witted, and is uproariously funny as he finds himself in over his head trying to chase down a mouse.

Nathan Lane makes the most of his role as Ernie. The character is an idiot who doesn’t understand that he’s an idiot- he thinks he’s smart, and while he’s smart enough to have owned a restaurant, he’s not smart enough to understand moments when he should just walk away when they present themselves. Ernie doesn’t grasp that he’s in over his head- he’s letting greed dictate his decisions, and there’s a bit of an underhanded quality in the character as well. Watching him blunder from one disaster to another though is a whole lot of fun, and Lane clearly relishes the role, bringing out the best of himself in the performance.

Mousehunt is a deviously fun film, with a manic energy that plays very much like a cartoon, pitting a pair of morons against a resilient little adversary. Its rich sense of humour and light touch always brings a smile to my face, and appeals to my own taste in what’s funny.

Someone Please Make Gore Verbiniski Stop

Links to see to before we get ourselves started today. Check out Norma's blog for her look at the Razzie awards. We've got ourselves another Snippet Sunday blog posted at the joint page. The Happy Whisk asks if this is true or false. You decide. Eve has an orchid blossoming.  And at The Real Maple Syrup Mob, we have a cat tutorial on how to attract rabbits. Now then, today it's time for a movie review... one that I'm glad I didn't see in the theatres. I picked it up last week on an express shelf in the library... and I was not impressed.

"People think you are dead. Better you stay that way." ~ Tonto

"Why are you talking to that horse? Why am I covered in dirt?" John Reid

"I buried you." ~ Tonto

Last summer, director Gore Verbinski and producer Jerry Bruckheimer reunited with Johnny Depp for the action-western-comedy The Lone Ranger. Depp came on board to play the unlikely role of Tonto, while the title character got handed over to the inexplicably named Armie Hammer. The end result was a mess filled with distracting continuity glitches, geographical errors, story plotholes, and more problems. It bombed in the theatres, and with good reason.

The story bounces around in time, starting off at a fair in the 1930s as a boy encounters an elderly Indian (Depp), a Comanche who identifies himself as Tonto and begins to tell him the story of how he and the Lone Ranger met. This takes us back in time to 1869, where lawyer John Reid (Hammer) is on a train into Texas. The same train is carrying two prisoners, a renegade Indian, the aforementioned Tonto, and an outlaw named Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) due to be hanged. The train comes under attack from some of Cavendish's gang out to rescue their boss, and Reid and Tonto first meet while dealing with the crisis. Tonto is jailed nonetheless, we briefly meet John's sister-in-law Rebecca (Ruth Wilson) and her son. She will, of course, become the requisite love interest. 

Reid's brother Dan (James Badge Dale) deputizes John as a ranger to go after Cavendish and his gang. Things go seriously wrong, and the posse are all shot down and killed by Cavendish and the others. All except for John, left for dead but recovered by the conveniently escaped from jail Comanche who seems to think the bird on his head is alive and that the brother he has saved (the wrong brother) is a spirit walker who can't be killed.  Thus the two unlikely partners must work together in a story that brings in a horse with an attitude, a corrupt Army officer (Barry Pepper), a businessman with delusions of grandeur (Tom Wilkinson), and a brothel madam with a rather unusual prosthetic leg (Helena Bonham Carter). And it's all tied together with a whole lot of silliness.

Gore Verbinski has something of an eclectic history as a director. One of his earliest films was the priceless black comedy Mousehunt, and he's best known for the Pirates of the Caribbean films (he really should have stopped after the first three). Of those films, his production partner has been Jerry Bruckheimer, who's made a career in movies and television of loud and occasionally obnoxiously boorish stories that feature lots of explosions and rock music underscore. The Lone Ranger is, in short, the hubris of both coming back to haunt them. The film was plagued with production problems and an over the top budget straight off. The story is from a trio of screenwriters, Justin Haythe, Ted Elliot, and Terry Rossio. What they craft is filled with errors. While the story seems to be set in Texas, it moves all over the map geographically, from Monument Valley to Promontory Point (all while dragging history through the mud). It gets numerous details wrong, to say the least (as if we could expect accuracy in a film like this). It doesn't even pay attention to its own continuity- there are plenty of mistakes, such as dirt on a body that's not there in the same way in the next frame- that make you wonder if anyone was paying attention during filming.

And the film doesn't help in that it jumps around in time, not only from decades later, but often in the course of the 1869 timeline where we're seeing something one moment that might only make sense later on. It's distracting, but not in a good way. It also doesn't help to have the kid hearing the story from the elderly Tonto- it's not a framing sequence; the narration interrupts with regularity, and I found myself disliking the kid. It's probably a good idea to refrain from using child actors to begin with; something about this kid struck me like fingernails on a blackboard. They could have dropped the narration element entirely, told the film in a linear fashion, and it wouldn't feel so grating.

Verbinski and Bruckheimer assembled a crew with this production that brings mixed results to the film. Makeup actually does its job. Tonto's entire look is rather striking, and apparently based on paintings of Native peoples (though the dead bird on his head is a bit much). And Fichtner in particular looks suitably hideous as the outlaw Cavendish; he looks like he's been out in the sun for too many years and has been beaten over the head with an ugly stick, so the makeup department went out of their way with giving him that look. This also applies to set design, which evokes the Old West in a great deal of the finer details (even if the crew can't keep track of how much dirt ought to be on a body from one moment to the next).

Much of the filming was done on location, so we've got beautiful western settings (including the obligatory Monument Valley scenes that are seen in every western), and the camera work captures that reasonably well. The special effects and set work for the climax of the film, featuring two trains on a runaway chase through the mountains, also work in making the sequence work (even though geographically the start off of the sequence does not mesh with the bulk of the scene). In fact, the train sequence late in the film actually helps the movie... but not enough to compensate for the other problems that tanked the film. One other member of the crew worth mentioning. Hans Zimmer composes the score, and as usual goes for bombastic and over the top in his signature style, though it works. This is one of those cases as so often happens with movies where the score is the best part of the movie. Zimmer even incorporates Rossini's William Tell Overture into the climactic sequence of the movie, weaving the familiar music with his own score.

The cast is generally made of actors who should have known better than to get themselves in on something like this. Most of them, however, are not to blame for the fiasco this film became (one glaring exception to that). William Fichtner has been playing various dirtbags, villains, and nefarious sorts down through the years as a character actor. He's nearly unrecognizable here, but his Cavendish is an addition to that resume of roles (though Robert Redford, the ghost of Paul Newman, and writer William Goldman would object to the insult to an iconic character with the similar sounding name). Tom Wilkinson is one of those outstanding actors who's often one of the more interesting elements in any film he makes. He's playing a seemingly considerate man named Latham Cole when we first meet him, but underneath all that is a greedy bastard out to get even richer than he already is. Barry Pepper's also one of those actors who tends to be interesting to watch, and seems to suit the part of a soldier well (he's played that before in another period uniform). However, a weakness of the script itself seems to suggest his corruption just happens, which must annoy the actor.

James Badge Dale doesn't last long in this film as the lawman Dan Reid, but is at least plausible as a lawman in the Old West. He looks comfortable in the saddle, and as an actor is slowly building a good resume of work, including 24, The Pacific, Iron Man 3, and The Conspirator. I would have rather preferred him in the lead as the title character. Ruth Wilson is an actress I was unfamiliar with before now, but she plays the requisite part of the damsel in distress reasonably well, with romantic history with two brothers, and a son with one of them. I'd like to see what she's capable of in a film that's better. And Helena Bonham Carter, one of my favourite actresses, must have wondered what she was thinking getting into this film as Red. The character is eccentric and tends to come across as more of a plot device than anything else, used by the screenwriters to fill a plothole. At least Carter has a well established track record and can move off and do other things. 

The two leads are a problem, admittedly. I'll start out with the lesser problem. Johnny Depp is essentially channeling Captain Jack Sparrow with a glazed over Native American in his portrayal as Tonto. The take Depp has on the character is that of a man who's probably out of his mind, a nutcase who's crazy for the sake of being crazy, just like his signature Pirates role. It seems to me like Verbinski and Bruckheimer wanted him to play the role from that eccentric point of view rather than just as a straight on not for laughs character. Or maybe Depp has gotten to like playing eccentricity over and over again. It doesn't suit the character, though, but it's not really Depp's fault so much as it is those behind the scenes- the writers, producer, and director, all wanting to take another shot at that Pirates mentality. Johnny, do us a favour: for your next role, play something that's not eccentric.

Ultimately, the biggest problem of the film, which casts a fatal wound on it, is the actor playing the title role. Armie Hammer (why the hell did this man not change his name?) brings no weight, no gravitas, no sense of presence to the character. Tonto remarks on more than one occasion that the wrong brother came back from the dead, and in that, he's right. Dale would have been a better actor in the role, but instead we get stuck with an actor who we can't take seriously. Hammer seems to be sleepwalking through half the movie, or maybe he's just naturally boring, or maybe he's a pretty lousy actor. I'm inclined to think it's the last of those three options. It's a performance that just scuttles the entire film. This should be an object lesson to producers and directors: don't cast this guy in your film.

The Lone Ranger failed in spectacular fashion at the box office. It is filled with endless errors and gaffes that just hamper the whole thing from the point of view of the historian. The story itself is grating and derivative and wanders all over the place. It's entrusted to a director who needs to step away from filmdom for awhile and come back with something that's not so over the top. And its producer will never take a hint and just go away. Add to that a cast of supporting actors who are largely wasted in place of the spectacle of an empty story, a lead actor who needs to play a character who's not eccentric, and another lead actor completely out of his depth... and you've got the recipe for a film disaster. If you happen to watch this film at some point, you might want to make a drinking game out of this. Every time you have to roll your eyes at something in the story that annoys you, everyone takes another gulp.