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If you said "a walking, talking, thinking,
feeling 50-year-old little wooden boy," then you and I are on the same
unfortunate page, my little hombre/hombrette. Luckily, we won't be among the people unwittingly exposing themselves to the new release of Pinocchio; people who, by purchasing
a ticket are to my mind all but explicitly stating: "I
do not object to a 50-year-old man mincing around in a lacey puppet
costume. By purchasing admission to this Hollywood spectacle, I am tacitly
endorsing the idea of Roberto Benigni in a doll outfit, pirouetting
about here, there, and lo, all about a leafy glade." This new Pinocchio, it must be said, seems to tell a completely different tale from the Disney classic. For starters, it all seems to be set in the Moulin Rouge, where paunchy men with twirly moustaches wear full, sequined body suits. Secondly, and even more disturbingly, there's that whole "Pinocchio's a middle-aged man with coarse hair in all the wrong places" angle. Since I can't imagine a director with full use of his vision not spotting Benigni's sprout-like hair-batch as it entangles itself out of his costume throughout the trailer, I can only assume this horrifying spectacle was filmed on purpose, and worse, with the intent to project these images on a large screen to be viewed by children. Pinocchio takes place, judging from Benigni's age in the trailer, decades and decades and decades after the popular Disney film, long after both Gepetto and Jiminy Cricket have died -- along, presumably, with hope and dignity. This premise leads, naturally, to a lot of difficult questions. First, if Pinocchio's now grown into a functioning middle-aged adult, and has been a real boy/teen/man for years now, why doesn't he dress in a manner more befitting human beings? For pity's sake, he's 50 years old -- whatever "fish-out-of-water" premise he was supposed to embody, he's embodied it and then some. Let the poor guy buy some nice shirts. With all of Gepetto's woodworking skill, could he not manage to carve up Pinocchio some actual real people pants, instead of leaving him with nothing but a lifetime supply of stupid clown suits? To be frank, it takes a lot of the sheen away from the whole "being a real live boy" thing, when you add in the whole "being a real live boy, in a never-ending dark carnival of garish clownwear" aspect. I mean, you can be the realest boy in Realboy City, U.S.A., this movie seems to be telling us, but if you keep dressing like a little wood fetishist's toy, you're pretty much stuck with the set of cards God (or whoever carved you out of a block of pine) dealt you. I'm also forced to wonder, if this movie does in fact take place an entire lifetime after Pinocchio's transformation into a real boy, why we're being asked to care. Is Pinocchio: The Retirement Years honestly a story worth telling? Isn't his life quest pretty much fulfilled when he turns into a human? You don't see Sleeping Beauty sequels where she sits at home, bored and frumpy, waiting for a middle-aged Prince Charming to come home from the peeler bar. Nor do you see later versions of Snow White where, due to lower life expectancies for those afflicted with dwarfism and the hazards of working in mines, she attends funeral after funeral to cry over yet another tiny casket. You don't see this because it isn't necessary -- taking an ageless cinematic icon and tacking on a film about them growing old is like digging up a departed family member to see how they're doing. Trust me, you're better off with the memories. For the majority of the trailer, international annoyance Roberto Benigni runs around doing things that would only ever really be accepted if they were done by small children, the mentally handicapped, or -- admittedly -- Roberto Benigni. He runs through a clothesline, banging garbage pail lids together. He runs away from a guy who appears to be on fire (who shows up elsewhere in the trailer scarred by acid). He jumps over fences, peers around things, prances and gambols about.
If I were a child, I wouldn't much care to see this movie. It's not animated and it doesn't look terribly fun or exciting. Sure, it has a donkey -- but let's be honest, a lot of films have donkeys (Shrek... um, Shrek, A... Donkey's Tale... or, uh... So Many Donkeys. Okay, not that many). Of the others I can think of (often also featuring Italian male leads), children won't be able to see them until they're 18 anyway. However, when that day comes, may I personally recommend the What An Ass! series, parts one through four, seven and nine. If there is an audience for this film, it's probably composed of Italians. It is, after all, an Italian story starring an Italian icon who is portraying an Italian puppet. Of course, the Italians are also fans of hairy-pitted women, Brio Chinotto and smelling vaguely like stale salmon, so as cultures go, you can color me disinterested. As for Pinocchio, please color me
a far more vivid shade of disinterested. One and a half Billy Crystals. RATING:
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A quick
question before I delve into this review: what's creepier than a walking,
talking, thinking, feeling little wooden boy?
If
the Laws of Trailerdom are to be believed (Thou Shalt Blow Thine Entire
Load In The Coming Attraction), these scenes represent the best Pinocchio
has to offer. They have been selected with the express purpose of "selling"
you on the idea of shelling out hard-earned dollars and several hours
of your hard-earned life. Given the limp, lame, pointless mishmash of
scenes they've thrown together for the trailer, I would guess they could
have sold as many tickets with a voiceover saying "This Christmas,
Pinocchio!" to a montage of fat Japanese women gutting fish on
an assembly line for two minutes. It would have divulged as much of
the plot and provided about as much excitement as the scenes they've
chosen.