My history with the Muppets doesn’t really involve The Muppet Show, per se. While it’s a show I’ve seen countless clips of over the years, it’s just nothing I’ve ever been a huge fan of. My memories are of The Muppets Take Manhattan, Muppet Babies and A Muppet Family Christmas (which we had taped one year and watched religiously each holiday season). So my interest in the new film, The Muppets, stemmed more from the way it was made rather than the subject matter itself.
Jason Segal (of “How I Met Your Mother” fame) stars in The Muppets, but he also co-wrote the screenplay. He discussed it on NPR last week, which piqued Brooke’s interest and further solidified the fact that I/we needed to see the movie. The article discussed a range of things, but the points that were of greatest interest to me personally was that they wanted to make the movie with as little CGI as possible, and they wanted to produce a comedy that relied on “old fashioned ideals,” rather than most of the other comedies out in theaters today (e.g. anything by Judd Apatow…not that it’s a bad thing, but it’s nice to see an intelligent “family comedy” from time to time).
The movie itself centers on Segal’s character (Gary) and his brother, Walter, who is a Muppet (Note: it is not explained how, exactly, this happened. Brooke and I wonder whether Walter was adopted, or whether Gary was, as we never see the parents. I’m hoping I never have to explain this kind of genetic splicing to Meg someday). Walter goes with Gary and his girlfriend, Mary (Amy Adams), to Hollywood to see the old Muppet Theater, something that Walter had dreamed about since he was a child. Once they get there, they find out that an evil businessman (Chris Cooper) wants to buy the theater and tear it down to drill for oil, leading Walter and the gang to round up the other Muppets to organize a telethon to raise the money to buy it back.
It was great seeing all the memorabilia around the theater, including old photos and clips from the old Muppet Show. As I mentioned before, it’s not like I watched the original show all that much, but it was still neat seeing that history displayed with such reverence on the big screen again. The movie seemed to be reaching back into television history to a time when a show like that could make it on television, where in today’s world, the only way you’ll see Kermit The Frog on prime time is if he’s on an island or is living in a house with strangers. Many of the themes in the film could be considered “traditional,” but in this presentation, it seems more like “timeless” than anything.
The movie was also pretty funny. Not really “laugh out loud” funny or anything, but definitely chuckle-worthy and amusing. The self-referential humor was the most entertaining to me: stuff that may fly by a kid, but would still be funny to an adult. Chris Cooper would say “maniacal laugh…maniacal laugh…” rather than actually laughing in that evil way, for example. Or that they would “travel by map” to get from one location to another quickly in the story (like taking a car from the U.S. to Paris).
I was a little disappointed that they didn’t give the actors more to do, however. Amy Adams was in it from the beginning, but didn’t really do much until the last half of the movie. During the telethon, there were almost countless cameo appearances, but while you saw folks like Judd Hirsch and Neil Patrick Harris answering the phones, they didn’t have any actual lines of dialog (while others like Zach Galifianakis and Jim Parsons were a bit more prominent). It was obvious that the writers brought people in from multiple generations, so there would be cameos from people practically anyone would recognize (who the heck is Selena Gomez, anyway?).
But, this was a movie about the Muppets: not about the humans. And in the end, you’re left with a “feel good,” entertaining movie that brings a lot of familiar faces back together, and together for the first time. They did a great job with this movie, and they did it without 3D and with barely any CGI, proving that you can still tell a great story and make a great movie for kids and adults that only involves puppets and a few supporting people.
In today’s world (and if the previews before the movie are any indication, where almost all the previews were for upcoming CGI or 3D movies…) that’s certainly an accomplishment.