The Muppets
DIRECTED BY JAMES BOBIN
Though it may seem counterintuitive, pairing Lars von Trier’s Melancholia with The Muppets actually works quite nicely. Bear with us. Both, in a sense, are about worlds ending (the world itself in Melancholia, in the The Muppets the world being the furry gang’s old studio). Both are campy, highly emotional (at times even slightly deranged) films. The argument could be made that Kirsten Dunst is the Muppet of von Trier, puppeteered by the manic-depressive director who is speaking through her in his latest film, but this may be taking things too far. Most importantly, both films hinge on notions of the melancholic, which if this comparison serves any point, is to set up the alliterative statement that what we have here is a case of the melancholic muppets.
Over a decade since the Muppets last graced the big screen, this latest instalment vacillates from being a manic-musical comedy to a deeply nostalgic—yes, that melancholic yearning—look back at an idealized time that once, and yet never, was. Apt Muppet fans will be quick to point out this has always been the Muppet shtick, with their variety-format TV show in the sitcom era. But considering that Jason Segel stars in and wrote the film—a man of the age that would have grown up with The Muppets on the olde boob tube—this look towards the past seems more complicated, but no less enjoyable as a feature film.
The Muppets is assuredly for this Segel set—the twenty- and thirty-somethings in record stores, finding romance in the return of synth—who (not to get all Marx-y) are dropping their relatively newfound disposable income on disposable cameras and other features of their youth. Yet The Muppets doesn’t feel like a retro-inspired cash grab like Footloose, Indiana Jones, or My Bloody Valentine. The film feels more genuine than that, openly acknowledging not only the specific yearning of Kermit and Fozzie for the past but Segel’s, and ours, as well. Opening in Smalltown—shown as a hand drawn, child-like map—from the outset it’s clear that the film’s present is equally as fabricated as its past. Again, this has always been the case with the Muppets, exposing the bare bones of the show in order to equally distract from and acknowledge the man hiding in an anthropomorphic felt frog suit. But because The Muppets has nothing to hide regarding its constructed past, this nostalgia is heightened by its own self-reflexivity: we know we’re dreaming about something that never was. The resident Muppet curmudgeons hit on this point precisely, as while watching the finale (meta much?), Statler remarks: “I always dreamed we’d be back here.” Waldorf, not missing a beat quips: “Dreams? Those were nightmares!” In a way they are, since if The Muppets proves anything, it’s that we can’t go back to what never was.
Though for all this doom and gloom Kermit is no Lars. And to be the fair the film doesn’t feel like a cursory engagement with undergraduate philosophy (as this review very well might). The Muppets is undeniably funny and quick-witted, managing to sustain the “hey this is a movie” gag. After discovering the beloved Muppets studio is under threat from oil baron Tex Richman (Chris Cooper), Gary (Segel), Mary (Amy Adams), his long-term, second-fiddle-to-the-Muppets-playing girlfriend (echoes of Miss Piggy), and Gary’s muppet brother Walter (Peter Linz) help Kermit reunite the whole crew for a telethon. Hijinks and songs ensue, and it’s not spoiling anything to say the film rushes to a neat and amicable solution involving a bowling ball to the head. In all, its dark moments (Fozzie schlocking a casino to a modified Paul Williams’ “Rainbow Connection” in a Muppets cover band with David Grohl on drums—grim) only make the comic relief (Cooper rapping) all the more pleasurable. And whereas von Trier’s world has to be destroyed and consumed by the weight of its existence, The Muppets hopes for rebirth by fusing the past with the present, making something not exactly new but not entirely dissimilar. In the end, The Muppets is very much like those rainbows Williams sang about: “visions, but only illusions. And rainbows have nothing to hide.” Neither do The Muppets.