‘Pinocchio’ (2022: directed by Guillermo del Toro and Mark Gustafson)

 

The buzz on del Toro’s Pinocchio (Netflix 2022) was very promising (Mark Kermode thought it a near flawless five-star masterpiece) so I sat down to watch with high hopes. Those hopes, however, were not fulfilled. Disappointment!

Hi diddle dee-dee, this movie’s not for me. I thought it dreary, plodding, ponderous, draggingly slow. The animation is painstaking and very detailed but lacks any sprightliness or pep. The characters move and interact as if pushing through transparent treacle, every last gesture and twist and flick over-telegraphed. The design has moments of striking Del-Toroesque Goth-appeal, but a movie cannot exist purely on its design. What about everything else? The voice acting is underpar: David Bradley plays Geppetto with an unlikeable querulousness; Christoph Waltz delivers a haphazard, overwrought performance as the villainous Volpe; and whenever Ewan McGregor’s Sebastian J. Cricket was on screen I found myself thinking back to Toast of London, in the recording booth, with Clem Fandango on the other side of the glass: ‘that’s great Ewan, really great: could you do it again, make it a little more likeable? Great—and again please? One more time please. OK we'll go again.’ Fire the nuculire weapons!

The attempts at humour, without exception, misfire: a problem both with the conception of the comic moments themselves (the cricket is squashed! again! and again!) and with the timing of them. The timing is out for most of the story beats, actually. Also the plot makes little sense. Do I apply a hobgoblin-of-little-minds criterion of pedantic consistency to a fairy tale, though? Is that really what I'm doing? Say it’s not so! But a story needs to have a coherence, a logic, even if it’s not the logic of verisimilitude. My sense with this film is that the story is never quite sure how Pinoccho is supposed to figure.

So: at first the pious Catholic 1930s Italian villagers are convinced that Pinocchio is possessed by the devil. Then, instantly, he is integrated into the local school system so much that the local fascist podestà comes round to Gepetto’s house in person to rebuke him for the lad’s truancy—after missing just one day! So why didn’t Pinocchio get to school? It was because, on his way there, he was tempted away by evil circus-svengali Count Volpe—it seems Pinocchio is at one and the same time both an unremarkable ligneous boy in his hometown and a startling freak-show marvel whom people will pay top dollar just to watch. Odd, that. When Gepetto and the podestà both try to retrieve the boy from this new life of circus performing Volpe shows-off the signed contract. Except that Pinocchio (who hasn’t ever been to school, remember) can’t write, so has instead drawn a smiley face at the bottom of the document. This is treated as legally binding, with Volpe angrily threatening to bring his lawyers down on everyone, although one wonders under what provision of contract law such a document, doodled upon by an illiterate minor, would be binding. It hardly matters, anyway, because the plot then guilliotines this entire development by having Pinocchio abruptly run over and killed by a lorry. He spends a little time in an archly-conceived, plum-coloured afterlife, all dark purple sand, coffin-clad cliff-faces and skeletal rabbits playing cards, ruled over by a mauve sphinx (this character is another iteration of the blue fairy: the movie’s one and only female character). It turns out that Pinny is immortal and so back to Italy he goes.

Discovering that the boy cannot die, the podestà gets very excited: put him in the army, he cries, to fight for the patria fascista! Does he go to Gepetto and say: “old man, make me an army of such unkillable soldati”? He does not! Instead he recruits Pinocchio into youth camp, alongside his own son, trains him for a bit and then, randomly, instructs his son (who has befriended the puppet) to shoot him with a pistol and kill him. Seems a waste. I suppose his idea is to, I don’t know, toughen-up his boy. But the lad refuses, the podestà is killed by an allied bomb whistling down directly onto his head and the movie lurches into its final act.

Gepetto and Sebastian Cricket have gone in search of Pinocchio and on the way been swallowed by a giant dogfish—a whale in Disney’s version of course, though it’s a huge dogfish in Collodi’s original 1883 novel. In the novel, though, Pinocchio and Geppetto easily escape; this film’s denouement, in which Sebastian hatches an elaborate plan to climb out through the fish’s ‘blowhole’ (a stoma that squalus acanthias, being a species of fish rather than mammals, does not possess) draws on Disney rather than Collodi.

Pinocchio blows-up the dogfish and dies, which is no biggie since he is immortal; but—oh no!—down in the mortal world Geppetto is drowning. P is told that if he wants to go straight back to life, instead of waiting the arbitrarily imposed ten minutes (or whatever) lag-time, then he must sacrifice his immortality. He gladly does this, goes back, saves his father and dies in the process. Except that then he’s brought back to life anyway. It’s a confusing zig-zag that is trying to tug your heartstrings, but which just leaves you baffled.

Then there are the songs. The songs are awful. Utterly unmemorable. Impossible to imagine any one of these smeary dollops being remembered 80 days from now, never mind 80 years—the way ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’, ‘Give A Little Whistle’, ‘Hi-Diddle-Dee-Dee’ and ‘I've Got No Strings’ are still universally recognised and loved.

Bringing in Disney, of course, tips my hand. It is unfair, and arguably point-missing, to compare this movie to to the peerless Disney Pinocchio (1940)—Del Toro is clearly, indeed rather clangingly, not trying to remake the beloved Disney original (unlike the dire Roger Zemeckis retread). That's fair enough. My problem is not that Del Toro’s approach is stylistically and tonally unlike Disney’s (although the animation certainly misses the sprightliness and life Disney’s team achieved), or that he has moved the story from a nonspecific 19th-C milieu to a specific, fascist-Italian 1930s/40s one. It is that his film creaks, lumbers, misses, bores, outstays its welcome. That it doesn't work.

‘But,’ you will say, ‘how can you nitpick and picknit at the plot logic of Del Torro’s movie and overlook the daftness of the original plot?’ I agree, the plot of the 1940 movie is just as illogical in its way as this 2022 one. But I would argue that the aporiae in the 1940 movie’s plotting are, actually, expressive of the movie’s key concerns, in a way that isn’t true of the 2022 film.

For example: in the 1940 movie, naughty boys, including P., are inveigled by a mysterious ‘Coachman’ to voyage to Pleasure Island. Here they are indulged with champagne, cigars, all the food they can eat, gaming tables, and an island-ful of fine things for them to vandalise—to smash, wreck and ruin. The Mona Lisa is there! And those naughty boys have defaced it! 

But it’s all a ruse: there is some magic on the island that means, the more the boys misbehave, the quicker they turn into jackasses: literal donkeys, which the Coachman then ships off and sells, to hard labour in salt mines and suchlike.

But think about this for a moment, under rubric of a business proposition. How much does it cost the Coachman to fit-out Pleasure Island? Never mind the endless booze and cigars, food, sundry costs of portage, the labour required to herd and ship-out the finished-product donkeys. What about the paintings? In 1962, the Louvre insured the Mona Lisa for $100 million (about a billion dollars in 2022 cash). 

Long story short: there really has to be a cheaper way to produce jackasses, so as to sell them on at profit.

And of course there is! It’s called ‘sex’. You get a mummy donkey and a daddy donkey together and, via a special kind of donkey cuddle, a baby donkey gets born. Certainly cheaper, and therefore more profitable, than the Coachman’s method.

Of course I’m being deliberately obtuse. We are not expected to read this sequence literally. It’s a piece of fabulation, talking metaphorically rather than mimetically: it's saying ‘allow a boy to behave badly and follow his bestial instincts and he will turn into a jackass’. That’s a way of telling a moral story, in a dramatic and visually arresting way. You could make the same argument about the oddities of plotting in the Del Toro movie.

But I’d argue the 1940 Pinocchio is doing something else with the Pleasure Island sequence. It hinges on the question above. Isn’t there a cheaper, more efficient way of ‘making’ donkeys? Obviously there is. Sex. But in the world of Pinocchio sex is precisely what is missing, what is taboo or interdicted—because it’s a children’s film, because it’s a war film and the men are all away in the army separated from their wives, or for deeper reasons. Something is broken in the logic of fertility in this colourful animated land. A cool blue-coloured fairy gifts life to a puppet (because that’s what women can do) and it comes alive, sort-of. We could say: Geppetto has made a son the hard way, constructing it like Frankenstein did his monster, rather than the easy way (I say easy: when the two of us made our son, it was my wife who did all the heavy lifting of course). But Geppetto doesn’t circumvent ‘nature’ out of hubristic arrogance, the way Frankenstein does. He does it because … well, why? Because he lives in a land without women and has no alternative, perhaps? This, it seems to me, is part of the pointedness of the movie: it is, in its brilliant, colourful, vividly-sung, often hilarious way, a kind of “Waste Land”, a film about a kind of desolation: the old world having died—to quote another famous Italian—and the new world yet to be born, we find ourselves in an interregnum in which a great variety of grotesque and wonderful symptoms appear.

What’s the equivalent for the Del Torro Pinocchio? Why the clonking relocation to Fascist Italy, turning the movie into an epigone Pan’s Labyrinth? Del Toro is, in part, saying: fascism is bad. Which, I have to agree, is true, for fascism is indeed bad; although it’s a truth not very eloquently or resonantly expressed by this movie. What else? Is the point that fascism treats human beings like puppets, disposable, controllable, mere things? Is that it? Or that fascism is a kind of malign circus act, a puppet show, all outward display and inward emptiness?

I daresay I’m both overreading and under-praising this film. Lots of people I know, whose opinions I respect, really love it. Still: it’s a Pinocchi-no from me.