The Incredibles
Super, Man
I know — or rather, I have heard — that someone out there does not like The Incredibles. I won’t reveal the name of the person — although, actually, I don’t think I remember it, or was ever told it in the first place. No matter. The fact is out there; someone out there that is related to someone I know doesn’t like this movie for some reason I don’t really understand.
This surprised me, although it should not have. I know not everybody likes everything. There are people out there that don’t like Dr Pepper, just for example. Lots of people — Up North, let’s say, or in France — wouldn’t ever think of drinking iced tea. (Note: I have since moved Up North, and they do drink iced tea up here, and it’s horrible.) It’s not completely unreasonable or illogical to think that someone out there wouldn’t like The Incredibles for some reason.
Or maybe I’m wrong about this.
What, after all, could there possibly be to dislike about The Incredibles?
Certainly not the animation. This is a Pixar movie, of course, and the first Pixar movie to show humans as principal characters. Humans have hair, you see, and wear clothes, and that presents problems for animation. (Remember, for example, Woody the Cowboy’s painted-on hairstyle.) Pixar has licked these problems, mostly — check out the flexible mane of hair on Violet Parr, the oldest daughter in the Incredible family.. With The Incredibles, we get the best of both worlds — all the advantages of animation to create impossible characters and weird settings, while still having the characters look and act as though they were real.
Certainly not the voice talent. It’s true, now, that Pixar is cutting costs here with The Incredibles, and can’t cast A-list talent for its voiceovers anymore — but that’s a secondary concern. (Witness the fate of Shark Tale, even with Will Smith and Jack Black and Robert DeNiro.) Craig T. Nelson has the lead, and he sounds nothing like he did in the Coach TV series, where he was overstressed and hyperactive all the time, and whiny. He is serious and stolid, and doesn’t have the sneer in his voice that Patrick Warburton would have brought to the proceedings. He is upstaged, though, by the female members of his family, and a good thing, too. Holly Hunter is Mrs. Incredible, and it’s a pleasure just to hear her voice in a role where she doesn’t have to hide her delicious accent. But it’s Sarah Vowell who steals the show as Violet, the oldest child; the NPR host’s voice defines what distinctive is, and her tortured consonants mesh well with the character’s teenage angst.
So, if it’s not the hardware, or the software, it must be the design — that is to say, the plot, or the story, or what have you. The Incredibles starts in medias res, with the dashing Mr. Incredible and the intrepid Elasti-Girl racing along the rooftops to catch a wicked (and very French) villain before their wedding ceremony begins. The Incredibles, thankfully, doesn’t mess around with the tedious “origin” stories; its characters are extremely strong or flexible, and that’s that.
However, along the way, Mr. Incredible rescues — and injures, slightly — someone who very much doesn’t want to be rescued, and litigation ensues. It turns out that superheroes, and the cities that call on them in time of need, are deep pockets, and pretty soon an entire class of superheroes are exiled to the suburbs, there to live out their lives in anonymity and disgrace. (We never get to meet Mr. Incredible’s neighbors, but it would have been appropriate if one of them were an ex-mobster or someone else in the Witness Protection Program, it’s the same deal.)
The story flashes forward from here; Mr. and Mrs. Incredible are Mr. and Mrs. Bob Parr, with their three children — the moody Violet, the obnoxious Dashiell, and the baby Jack-Jack. And, of course, the family is called back to duty, with new, bright-red superhero outfits, and that’s about all you need to know going in. (But rest assured, everything else about the story is cool.)
What, then, could motivate someone not to love The Incredibles?
I have a few guesses, nothing more.
1. The Incredibles is unfair to the insurance industry. The scriptwriters, you see had to put poor Bob Parr in the least superheroic job they could have imagined, so they placed him as a claims adjuster for a large insurance company. The insurance company, like all insurance companies in movies, is predictably evil, and Bob fights the evil by giving all those whose claims are denied the forms they need to appeal the decision. Pfui.
2. The Incredibles rips off the “Fantastic Four”. Guilty. There are only so many superheroic abilities to go around, you know, and most of them have been dealt with by the Marvel comics universe. Mr. Incredible has the same powers as The Thing, although he never says “It’s clobberin’ time”. Elasti-Girl may be Mr. Fantastic’s daughter, who knows? That would make Violet the granddaughter of the Invisible Girl, which also makes sense. Young Dash is clearly modeled after The Flash. (I will leave it up to the viewers to spot the Human Torch reference.)
3. The Incredibles dabbles into the weirdsma of superhero politics. This is mostly ground that has been plowed by Bryan Singer’s X-Men movies, all of which have the subtext of treating superheroes as members of an oppressed minority group (with the added bonus of smacking around the Republicans for a bit). Mr. Incredible switches from a blue super-suit to a red super-suit about halfway through the movie, which is apporpriate; he’s a red-state guy in a red-state movie. His politics, though, are the mirror image of those of the X-Men; he’s not oppressed because he’s superior, he’s depressed because society celebrates the inferior. He objects to the idea, for example, that Dash shouldn’t use his super-speed on his middle-school football team, because it would draw too much attention to the super-ness of the family.
It’s hard to know what to make of the politics of The Incredibles, mostly because it’s an argument about nonexistent superpowers. Not to say you can’t have a political discussion about things that don’t exist — the supposed threat of global warming, the supposed problems with genetically altered foods, the bravery of the French military, or Celine Dion’s talent — but that it’s pointless, and weird. It says something about the politics of your average movie critic that the ethos of The Incredibles tends to show up in reviews, overshadowing the other, wonderful elements in the movie.
But none of this matters. The Incredibles is superior in every way, balancing the excellence of the Pixar craft and the brilliance of the storytelling. Even the most minor of quibbles — including the underutilization of Samuel Jackson, yet again — cannot distract from the quality and style that we’ve come to expect of Pixar. The Incredibles does the one thing that it needed most desperately to do — live up to its name — and more.