This week I wanted to make a simple point: Andrew Stanton’s WALL-E is a near-masterpiece of A.I. proportions and socio-political implications, reduced by its cloying musical score to just another ingenious Disney/Pixar heart-tugger. The most effective way to illustrate this would have been to create a video mash-up of the WALL-E score and an immersive philosophical sci-fi like 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX-1138 or Tarkovsky’s Solaris. But my laptop’s down, so I’m stuck here telling you rather than showing.
Let’s try another way:
This column is written by a single man in his 30’s who spends a lot of time alone. If Disney or Sony or the Weinstein Company made a movie about my life, there would be lots of alienated, bassy sounds over shots of me staring red-eyed at a library computer screen; piano tinkling accompanying my pitiful walk home; despairing choral chants and Middle Eastern wailing as I trudge up to the arthouse ticket booth on a Saturday night (”One for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, please.”). You all would feel sorry for me and maybe see something of your own sorrows in mine. But you’d walk out of the movie filing me away with other cinematic sad sacks, somewhere between Travis Bickle and the fat guy with the watery eyes in Heavy. Then, on to dinner and your own troubles.
But how could you forget me so easily? Don’t my isolation and suffering mean something beyond the screen? What about the scene where they diagnosed me with that rare illness? Or when that stick-up kid shot me in the leg? I was just trying to get home to my noodles. My dog falling down the elevator shaft–only a faint memory now, huh?
Well, I blame the music. It never let you really get that close to me, beyond how cute and pathetic I am. There’s a lot more to me than my pratfalls and one-liners and humiliations. Even in my scene of triumph, when I won over the girl from the clutches of that finance asshole, your applause was mere ritual, far from spontaneous, because a 90-piece orchestra and a synth blast told you just when to decide that I was The Man. You clapped for me the way you’d clap for somebody else’s kid at the school play.
Okay:
WALL-E joins Shadow of a Doubt and On the Waterfront as another brilliant and devastating visual statement on American life dulled and softened by an overbearing orchestral score that says, “It’s only a movie, y’all. Have fun. Shrek it up. More popcorn!” The film’s mostly wordless first act builds a convincing world and lets the trash-compacting robot WALL-E wander yearningly through it (his loneliness in a world he never knew jibing with our wistfulness amid familiar ruins). Other than the old musical number WALL-E watches and imitates, Ben Burtt’s sound design is as much music as this segment requires. Along with the expected Pixar dynamism and grit, Burtt’s work makes WALL-E’s junkyard Earth a very real, menacing, strange and wondrous graveyard for the American empire.
This intense WALL-eyed subjectivity and naturalism-plus-reminiscence can hang with the greatest of Studio Ghibli animations (and early Pixar shorts). Ghibli directors Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata can make things like leaves and parasols weep and die real deaths. Burrt and Stanton do the same for our beloved 20th century gadgets. But Thomas Newman’s score emerges like clockwork at plot points to lend the film a more Dreamworks-ish sense of hectic postmodern showmanship. Party time, not story time. The film’s cluttered and increasingly talky midsection set on a space colony/resort/mall throws the party in full swing.
Yo Pixar, howbout a WALL-E DVD with the option to mute the musical score? Underneath your reliably sturdy, entertaining 2008-edition Disney product is a film of finer and deeper Pixar shadings that might just rouse the consumer blobs in the audience out of their floating recliners– rather than simply prod, placate and party with them. But that would be truly revolutionary, and I doubt your overlord Disney is having any part of that.
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