The Incredibles

WARNING: This review has spoilers. (My wife insisted on me adding this warning. I may be lucky to still be alive....)

I hate this blogging software! I accidentally hit control-R and lost about a paragraph and a half.

This will be a short review, then.

Go see The Incredibles! Even accounting for the fact that I went in with low expectations to see a funny movie with superb animation, which this is, I was very pleasantly surprised. Were I to describe the film in one word, it would be, "benevolent." This is high praise for a Hollywood fictional product today. After seeing Ray (which I also strongly recommend), I thought about reviewing it. I was going to make the point that in the nihilistic cultural context of Hollywood, almost the only thing the film industry was capable of getting right was a documentary. I was pleased to see that this is not the case.

The movie features a family of superheroes forced to live in a "John Edwardsian" world of mediocrity: their heroics, it seems, have become too much of a liability issue for the government to continue using their services. Superheroics have been banned and super heroes have to live in anonymity. Father is in a dead-end job he hates, bored, flabby, and frustrated. Mother gets along OK raising her kids, but the boredom felt by her kids and husband are straining the family. Son Dash, who has no outlet for his super speed, gets into trouble for pulling pranks. Violet turns into a shy Goth type, turning invisible when the boy she likes approaches. She can do much more than disappear, but she lacks the confidence she might have got from being able to be who she is.

Pop manages to find work that lets him use his super powers and starts returning to his adventurous, buff, efficacious past self. But events quickly suck Pop, Mom, the kids, an old superhero friend, and Baby into using their super powers first to save themselves, then a city from an attack. The villain is an envious mediocrity out to destroy Mr. Incredible first, then all superheroes. His best line (approximately) is, "... then I'll sell my inventions so everyone can be super. And when everyone is special, no one is special." The Incredibles win, of course, but they all undergo the same transformation as Mr. Incredible did. Dash is thrilled to get to run, though he is kind at track meets. Violet stops hiding and accepts a date with the boy she has a crush on. They not only defeat the villain, but they experience the joy of being alive, of not having to live down to the expectations of a society that worships mediocrity.

The movie tackles these sophisticated issues with a grace and lightness that allowed it to still be great fun to watch. Even something I had misgivings about works in its favor. I mentioned earlier that the movie promised to be funny. Bob starts out looking a little too big for that super suit. His wife, Elastagirl, has developed quite a caboose over the years, as the previews kept showing us. Lots of critics and the ads seemed to emphasize the angle that the movie showed superheroes as "ordinary human beings," as if ordinary means mediocre. Quite to the contrary, this ordinariness succeeds in making us see the human condition in our heroes, and in doing so, allows us to see the heroic in ourselves. This movie, like Ray, is very well integrated. In Ray, we see the complete Ray Charles, virtues and flaws, as a whole. We see him beat his heroin addiction when he realizes it will take his music from him. Likewise, in The Incredibles, we see the integration of action and mental health that is part of the human condition. These human beings are super heroes and are not really well unless they can act as super heroes.

This movie is fun. It is cute without being insipid. It teaches and entertains. It shows up, seemingly from nowhere, and saves Hollywood from being devoured by that great arch-villain, mediocrity. This is a feel-good movie as a feel-good movie can and out to be.

Some cartoon!

-- CAV