A Bug's Life

Following the game-changing success of Toy Story, Pixar still had something to prove but also won themselves a great deal more breathing room from the heavy executive supervision that plagued (and occasionally helped) their first feature. Demonstrating that the creative team's penchant for grabbing story ideas from interesting places was no fluke, Lasseter and co. decided to adapt a number of films rooted in the great Japanese masterpiece Seven Samurai, specifically its loose parody, Three Amigos! But how is that interesting, one might ask? Well, they transplanted the story into the microcosmic world of ants, a universe so small that the words on the poster were written in lowercase.

Small protagonists set against wide backdrops are a Pixar staple, from toys who make even a child seem a giant to clownfish in the Pacific Ocean to a rat scurrying through the city of Paris to a wee trash compactor with treads that explores outer space. So, the idea of ants scurrying around a world where a blade of grass is proportionate to the size of a tree to a human (thus making the actual tree in the middle of the any colony seem like the Tower of Babel) surely caught the animators' imaginations. As few could argue, A Bug's Life represents a marked step up from the animation of the limited backgrounds of Toy Story: gorgeous green blades rub up against blue skies and fertile soil gives way to cracked, arid riverbeds in dry season. As seen on Pixar's Blu-Ray, A Bug's Life is one of the more visually tantalizing works in terms of its color scheme and large-scale design.

Unfortunately, the beauty of the backgrounds outweighs just about anything else in the picture, from the story to the characters to the design of the characters. Still working with technological limitations, the lack of fine texture in the plant life is excusable, but there are as many ants as blades of grass, it seems, and the shortcuts the animators take with the creatures that move stick out like sore thumbs among the rest of Pixar's spellbinding work across the years. Nobody seems to have a mouth distinct of the rest of the body, each colored in the same color as the body of the character in question with rudimentary teeth. Limbs typically flail, because when they move at a normal speed the animation looks awkward and unfinished.

The story does not have the usual Pixar ambition, either. Even more popcorn-oriented works like Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc. have a spark to them, a point-of-view that A Bug's Life lacks. One could go all the way back to 1912 and watch Władysław Starewicz's The Cameraman's Revenge to see a movie about anthropomorphizing bugs (and the director used actual roaches and such for his animation), and the Pixar team only fitfully attempts to build a unique point of view from this angle, choosing instead to insert a number of weak puns and lazily construct a world that looks like our own, albeit made from our scraps. There's nothing about a bug's life that seems so very different from a human's, except Bloody Marys are made with real blood.

Following the Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven/Three Amigos! line, the colony of ants depicted in the film are subject to the harsh rule of grasshoppers, who demand heavy tributes of grain to get them through the winter months, taking most of the harvest each year despite the far larger number of ants. Only one ant, Flik (Dave Foley), a misfit with a knack for thinking up inventions but an inability to make most of them function properly. After his idea for a motorized harvester ends up knocking the stone containing the tribute pile into the lake it overlooks and he subsequently attempts to stand up to the enraged grasshoppers until cowed into submission, Flik seeks to redeem himself by traveling off the island to hire larger bugs to defend the colony when the grasshoppers return.

Instead of finding warriors, Flik inadvertently recruits a band of failed circus performers -- masculine ladybug Francis, high-wire spider Rosie, gigantic rhinoceros beetle Dim, put-upon stick insect Slim, two foreign pill bugs, Teutonic caterpillar Heimlich, praying mantis magician Manny and his wife/lovely assistant Gypsy -- when he mistakes their reluctant altercation in a bar for valiance and strength. When Flik discovers his error after bringing the bugs back to the colony and receiving a hero's welcome, he spends much of the rest of the film covering up the truth so as not to diminish morale and earn yet more scorn.

But then the movie shifts to focus on the colony's feelings of togetherness, surely to build up the suspense to the inevitable fallout from the revelation of the true nature of the "warriors," but Lasseter lets the tension slack, laying the groundwork for a message of standing up to bullies and working together to pull off a plan bigger than any one person (or ant). That's fine and dandy, but even the short length of the film does not allow him to reach the reveal quickly enough to draw any weight from the scene. Worse, this entire plotline comes to feel like nothing more than a typical romantic comedy tale, complete with Big Misunderstanding.

A Bug's Life rallies at the end, when the grasshoppers return and Flik sets aside his self-doubt and inspires the ants to victory. We see the evil Hopper's resolve break when faced with a bird, real or fake, and the ants finally understand their power and how they never needed outside help at all, though they respect and value the circus bugs' contribution. Pixar don't yet have the technology, team size and/or budget for great water effects, but the rainstorm that hits is made convincingly terrifying from the small perspective despite the fact that the water does not seem to leave lasting wetness on what it touches. Yes, the ending is pat, but so is everything else in the movie; at least Lasseter finally injects some blood in the picture for the ants' fight back.

There are aspects of the film I quite admire. It's background animation, of course, which still lingers in my mind and makes a Blu-Ray purchase worth your money despite all the flaws. I also enjoy the idiosyncratic voice cast, from Phyllis Diller as the queen ant to NewsRadio geek Dave Foley as Flik. Though I usually side with the voice actors in their conflict with name stars getting fatter paychecks simply to talk in their normal voices, the choices here are too unique to be stunt casting. And finally, I think the message is great for young kids, who -- let's be honest -- are the target audience of Pixar's films, much as everyone might enshrine them in the annals of the entire medium. No shortage of anti-bully movies exists to my knowledge, but A Bug's Life makes the case for never taking abuse no matter your age.

Still, there is a tedium to this movie absent in nearly all other Pixar movies. The romantic subplot between Flik and Princess Atta detracts from the rest of the story and doesn't have nearly the charm of the other computer-animated ant movie from 1998, Antz (how weird is it that two such movies came out in the same year?). That film did a better job with its neurotic protagonist, more distinctive character animation that was also truer to bug movement while still humanizing the creatures, and just generally more imaginative. I still pop in A Bug's Life from time to time, but it always brings me down a little to watch a Pixar movie and focus only on the "pretty colors."

A Serious Man

Throughout their careers, Joel and Ethan Coen have drawn heavily upon the work of grotesque moralist Flannery O'Connor. Black humor, bleak outlooks on humanity, many of the Coens' central themes can be traced back to O'Connor. Except, that is, O'Connor's spirituality: the Coen brothers have a decidedly anti-humanist streak and, barring the Hell imagery of Barton Fink, have never really dabbled in the spiritual side of things, perhaps because they find their characters so morally repulsive that they see no point.

A Serious Man seeks to rectify this, and the Coens' retelling and reworking of the Biblical story of Job brings their work closer to O'Connor's oeuvre than ever before. Opening with a made-up Yiddish folk tale about a man who may or may not have invited a dybbuk (a corpse possessed by a wandering spirit) into his home, A Serious Man wastes no time taking stock of and poking fun at the brothers' storytelling conceits. Once the story cuts to its present, in 1967 Minnesota, the film draws from the Coen brothers' own lives even as it develops its Biblical parallels.

Job's stand-in here is Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg), a physics professor at a local university. He looks like he already has something nagging at him, but he has no idea what he's in for in the near future. He returns home to discover that his wife wants a divorce. "You knew this was coming," she hisses, though we can see from the bewilderment on his face that this is clearly not so (hilariously, his confusion only angers her more). She's fallen in love with Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed), a much older widower who treats Larry in far too friendly a fashion as he's stealing the man's wife. Larry's two teenage kids already seem to know, though the only attention they show their father is in demanding he fix the TV vane or simply stealing from his wallet.

As Larry worries over his private situation, work life begins to turn south as well. The question of his tenure hangs in the balance, just as a disgruntled Korean student attempts to bribe his way out of an F. Before Larry can officially report the boy, the student's father comes and threatens to sue for defamation of character if Larry exposes the bribe. But if Larry keeps the money and doesn't change the grade, Clive's father will out him for taking the money. I'm not accepting your son's bribe, Larry pleads. "That's defamation!" the father retorts, dooming Larry to carry the envelope filled with money around in a sort of limbo.

Interestingly, as the world comes crashing down on Larry piece by piece, A Serious Man contains little in the way of actual story. Characters have unexplained, impossible-yet-bizarrely-plausible quirks that get them in trouble, someone dies long before the climax and without reason (it's a Coen brothers film), but nothing that really moves a narrative happens. What the Coens accomplish instead is a thorough deconstruction of Jewish faith through its pop culture byproduct: Jewish humor. The brothers clearly took from childhood experiences growing up in late-'60s Minnesota as Jewish lads, but their efforts reach far beyond the merely autobiographical and instead into stereotypes and tradition. The stress of a Bar Mitzvah, harpy women, neurosis, phlegm, all are dismantled and reassembled by the Coens.

Even the overall structure of the film aids this; as life spirals out of control for Larry, he visits three rabbis to ask why God is punishing him. Re-arrange that sentence into, "So, this guy is having a lot of problems, so he visits these three rabbis..." and you've got a setup for a joke. Each of them has his own stereotypically Jewish response: one simply stammers that God can be mean sometimes, then tries to point to the bright side of life by looking out of the window, which only shows the synagogue parking lot. Another, with all the time in the world on his hands, has his secretary inform Larry that he's "busy." The second rabbi is the funniest and most Coenesque of all: he spins a long-winded fable about a dentist who discovered Hebrew engravings on a Gentile's teeth. He comes to the same rabbi to decipher why God would place those markings on the man's teeth...Oh, you want to know how that turned out? "Who cares?" the rabbi says with a smile.

Complimenting the directors (as well as Roger Deakins, back with the duo after missing Burn After Reading) seems a waste of time, yet one has to note how their perfect depiction of '60s rambler home suburbia goes beyond simple period goes beyond simple recreation. As with Barton Fink, the compositions of shots can never fully be trusted: sometimes the camera pulls back to capture something huge like the absurd height of Larry's cluttered chalkboard, but mainly the walls close in, always compressing Larry as some new development only makes things worse for him. Aiding the visuals is Skip Lievsay's flawless sound design, which adds gags through barely audible noises (such as Larry's brother Arthur constantly yelling that he'll be out of the bathroom in a minute even when no one on-screen has asked him about it) and even total silence. Tying them together is some of "Roderick Jaynes'" finest editing to date: the editing in No Country For Old Men largely facilitated that movie's suspense, and the same is true here, but it also recalls the more madcap, for-laughs technique of Raising Arizona or The Big Lebowski.

Stuhlbarg's performance is worthy of a nomination; we meet Larry just as the first domino tips, and never get to see him remotely happy. He stands at the epicenter of an increasingly turbulent nightmare, buckling under the pressure until he's ready to burst. Yet Stuhlbarg plays this chaos with hysterical deadpan passivity, reacting with bewildered looks and awkward smiles and tics but rarely losing his composure completely. You can believe that this man would come apart dealing with an ever-phoning bill collector from the Columbia Record Club, demanding payment for albums Larry never ordered. Surrounding are a host of unknowns (in stark contrast to last year's star vehicle Burn After Reading), all of whom are even more believable as their kooky characters for, as far as we know, these actors might simply be these people.

By the time we reach the end, the Coens have taken Judaism and Jewish humor and reconstituted them as one and the same. A Serious Man shows their greatest thematic range to date, covering topics such as faith, morality, family and suffering, but all with the devilish wit we're used to them using. The film opens with their idea of an old Yiddish parable and it ends as a whole new one in its own right: a version of Job in which man fails God's test. Its ending is sure to anger many viewers -- though how many times do people need to see a Coen brothers film to know that the ending will throw you? -- but it's perhaps the best example of their take on Jewish humor in the entire film: after all that Larry has suffered through, here at last come the real ordeals.