Reel Review
Monkeybone (2001)
Henry
Selick, the stop-motion animation whiz entrusted by Tim
Burton to bring The
Nightmare Before Christmas and James
and the Giant Peach to the big screen, is back after a five-year absence
with Monkeybone. Trading Burton's edge for producers that include
Michael Barnathan, Chris Columbus, and Mark Radcliffe the trio responsible
for, among others, Bicentennial
Man, Stepmom, and Nine
Months Selick's live-action/animation blend eventually triumphs over a
script loaded with lowbrow humor and cheap sentimentality.
Plagued by a lifetime of nightmares, artist Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser) only recently discovered happiness through a second career as a cartoonist and the love of Julie (Bridget Fonda), the sleep therapist who turned his life around. With his strip "Monkeybone" transformed into an animated series and his agent, Herb (Fraser's Blast from the Past co-star Dave Foley), pushing him hard to get into the lucrative world of merchandising, Stu is poised for huge success. Ironically, it's this merchandising that does Stu in when an unfortunate run-in with a huge inflatable Monkeybone lands Stu in a deep coma.
In screenwriter Sam Hamm and production designer Bill Boes' conception, a terrifying roller coaster ride lands Stu in a place that can best be described as Coney Island on mescaline. It's a seedy amusement park called "Downtown," a way station between life and death that is, in fact, the land of nightmares. It's there, in a dingy bar presided over by feline cocktail waitress, Miss Kitty (Marilyn Manson's former squeeze Rose McGowan), that Stu comes face-to-face with that most lucrative figment of his imagination, Monkeybone (voiced by John Turturro). In Stu's cartoons, the fuzzy little imp personifies the comic's adolescent boy hero's mortifying public erections. In the Downtown dive, Monkeybone works as a lounge singer with an act dedicated to his and Stu's object of desire, Julie.
It is in this Downtown midsection of Monkeybone, where live-action and animation meet, that the film truly comes alive. The world that Selick and company create of sinister carnival rides and mythical creatures like the serpent-tressed Medusa (Lisa Zane) and man/goat god of sleep, Hypnos (Giancarlo Esposito) has the richly atmospheric look and feel of a troubled, repressed subconscious set free. Hpynos tells Stu his nightmares are like "caviar," and, sure enough, the nightmare sequences are Monkeybone's highlights think M.C. Escher meets Dali meets the electric Kool-aid acid test. (A highlight is when Stu's dog dreams of human-sized cats chasing him with shears.)
Complementing these inventive visuals is Fraser, who's made a career of playing the sincere, not-quite-plugged-in naοf ever since his caveman role in Encino Man. Here, he effortlessly imbues Stu with a shy, wistful charm. That contrasts nicely with the claymation Monkeybone, an antic showman who can morph into a Marilyn Monroe impression, but more often, seems on the verge of becoming the fourth Stooge. He's the perfect id to Stu's ego.
But like the Petula Clark song, "Downtown" is the place you go to get away from your everyday life, and Stu can't stay there forever. Either Stu gets an exit pass back into his life from Death (Whoopi Goldberg) or one of her Darth Vader-like grim reapers will come calling. Back in the real world, Stu's sister Kimmy (an unfortunately cast Megan Mullally recycling her Will and Grace shtick) is vying to be Death's handmaiden in her zeal to pull the plug on her brother. Meanwhile, Hypnos coaches Stu in the art of stealing an exit pass, but neglects to to mention a side deal that will drop Monkeybone in Stu's real-world body while the cartoonist rots in jail with his fellow nightmare travelers, including Edgar Allen Poe.
It's in this last act, when Monkeybone the cartoon inhabits Stu's body, that Monkeybone the film threatens to derail itself. The fantasy with the light comic touch gives way to mostly crude humor that occasionally veers into the idiotic. Fraser is a gifted physical comedian and he manages to wring some laughs out of Monkeybone's attempts to navigate the world in his unfamiliar human body, including dive-bombing on the hapless Julie the first time he tries to make love to her. But with a denouement that depends on farting Monkeybone dolls and a rotting corpse (Chris Kattan) for laughs, the sublime charms of James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas feel like they existed about 100 years ago.
Selick, who bookends Monkeybone with cel-animation Monkeybone cartoons that set the comedy's tone at both entrance and exit, eventually prevails over the lamer aspects of Sam Hamm's screenplay. The alternate universe Selick and his production designer, animators, and special effects wizards create is so inviting, and the chemistry shared between Stu and the little monkey is so captivating, that Monkeybone's charms steamroll over its coarse finale. In the Downtown jail, when a rain of candy falls on the prisoners at feeding time, one of Stu's cellmates says to Stu, "You hope for Skittles; you settle for Milky Way." Monkeybone might not be Skittles, but it more than delivers that Milky Way.
PAM GRADY
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