Why So Serious About Speed Racer?

May 16, 2008

I come here not to bury Speed Racer, but to defend it.

As you may recall, I liked it quite a lot, which ended up putting me in a distinct minority. Critics panned it with a personal intensity that suggests the movie had insulted their mothers (witness professional laughingstock Armond White likening its racing scenes to friggin’ Nazi parades), and box office returns were limp compared to this summer’s so-far darling Iron Man. Even as a fan of the film, I had to acknowledge—thanks to the accursed rating system on the other site I write for—that Iron Man was the superior film. (I gave SR 3.5 stars out of 5, and IM got 4. Both are pretty rare from me.) And conventionally speaking, Iron Man is the better film: great actors, tight script, buckets of gee-golly action and special effects laced with humor and buoyed by just enough drama to keep the whole thing from floating away.

But Iron Man isn’t the one that’s stuck with me all this time. For all its (many) merits, it is indeed very conventional, and all possible questions have been answered by the time of its conclusion. It is what it is, and sophisticated delivery aside, the story engine is very simple.

No, Speed Racer is the one I can’t quite shake. It would also seem to be a very simple movie—prodigy kid races cars, defies corporations, thrills audiences and like-minded artistes alike—told in a manner that might best be described as “live-action cartoon.”

Or, to quote many of the nonplussed critics, like a video game. That Friday morning I counted five reviews that mentioned video games in some form or fashion, always used as a dismissal. As we all know, video games are simple synapse-firers that aspire to do little more than engage the senses for a period of time and then depart, perhaps with a few dead brain cells in tow. They contain no drama, no story, no catharsis, and are incapable of engaging higher brain functions. This from the TV generation.

At least that’s the underlying assumption behind many of the critical responses: that because Speed Racer is so loud and colorful and wears its message on its sleeve, it must therefore be simple and shallow, and “simple and shallow” is obviously, inherently inferior to more nuanced stories and storytelling. Obviously.

Right?

I went back and forth on this with a few people, in public and private forums. Those debates didn’t go anywhere, because my arguments for the movie sounded like arguments against the movie to those who didn’t like it: This movie is Pure Spectacle, I’d say. That’s the problem, would come the response. This is exactly the kind of movie that would’ve ripped my head open if I were eight years old, I’d say. But you’re not eight anymore, they’d say. Very true, but I failed to see what that had to do with anything.

In those debates and in those negative reviews, it always came down to this: that serious stories are better than fun stories, and think-pieces are superior to movies that dazzle. The underlying mentality, sometimes stated but more often implied, is that some storytelling goals are simply worthier than others. This was the natural order of things.

And I’m given pause, because I wonder what it is that drives these people to the movies, specifically. What about the medium calls to them? If it’s simply exquisitely-turned stories filled with subtle and graceful dialogue, why not seek out novels? If it’s a desire to see that subtlety and grace in visual form, why not paintings, sculpture, or comic books? Why the audio-visual medium?

Must movies be literature to be great, or is that shortchanging the full potential of the medium?

I’ve noticed a trend in my movie-going, year to year. Somewhere in the murky dumping ground of February and March releases, some completely crazy genre film comes down the pike that seizes my attention like little else. This year it was Doomsday, last year it was 300. By that point I’ve choked down several months of awards season fodder, deadly serious movies loaded down with quiet, portentous dialogue and the occasional epic battle. This is something like four months of characters who don’t tell each other how they feel, four months of acting done through tics of the eyebrows, four months of bleached color palettes, four months of musical scores that are either aggressively minimalist or aggressively over the top, all in the name of serious artistry.

Perhaps my middlebrow pretensions are showing, but I can only take so much of that before I start losing the will to go to the theater. I appreciate the finely-tuned works of our modern masters as much as the next guy, but every now and then I need to eschew the Coen Brothers’ precisely calibrated storytelling and P.T. Anderson’s “do you see what I did there” film-school shenanigans for something a little more… shall we say… aggressive? Maybe a little more cinematic?

Because here’s the thing: movies are an audio-visual medium. In an ideal state they’re meant to say as much with what they show as much as with what they tell, but somewhere along the line we’ve forgotten this. At most, you’ll see genre movies wash out blues or yellows from their palettes to give us grim-n-gritty, or maybe Michael Bay will put the camera down low to make the heroes seem more heroic. Nothing more than that; too few movies shift much of the storytelling duty from plot and dialogue to cinematography and color palette.

Maybe it’s because filmmaking is so young. I think the inclination is there to regard novels, paintings and the like as the “highest” art, the thing to which all other “lesser” (i.e., younger) forms must adhere to gain credibility and significance. Movies, popular as they are, are still a very young art form, considered by most patrons as “mere” entertainment.

But the technology is there, now, to make movies unlike anything you can find anywhere else… and to do it cheaply. Prose fiction can bring you internal nuance that’s simply impossible to duplicate, and nothing gives your thoughts forward motion like a kinetic piece of music. But they cannot give you Speed Racer. They cannot give you 300. They cannot give you Waking Life. These movies and others are triumphs of visual storytelling, a showcase for filmmakers who were unafraid to regard green-screens as their canvases and the whole of their technology—coupled with actors, dialogue, and plotting with increasing expertise—as their paints and brush.

I consider this artistic bravery of the highest order, as courageous as anything Lars von Trier or Michael Haneke has ever done… perhaps moreso, given how much more money and how many more eyes are on them. Yeah, so those movies are about race car drivers and macho Spartans and the like—so what? They’re impressionist movies, unafraid to lash together every tool at a filmmaker’s disposal to make a whole—and wholly unique—experience come to life. Using special effects, costuming, props, CGI, broad gestures and broader stories to create something new isn’t a crutch to filmmaking. It’s a full realization of what filmmaking can do.