“because the life you save could be mine”
Written: Dec 02 '03 (Updated Dec 02 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Jim Carrey and (yep) Morgan Freeman are really, really funny. And the movie is nice.
Cons: Cowardice.
The Bottom Line: Charming and hyperkinetic, but sappy, this is my favorite Jim Carrey movie except the three I like much better.
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| voxpoptart's Full Review: Bruce Almighty |
The first indulgence we need to grant Bruce Almighty is that the title, presumably, tested a lot better in focus groups than accurate titles like Bruce Kinda Locally Mighty or Almighty with Training Wheels. The actual Almighty, as played by an unexpectedly funny Morgan Freeman, is a showman of the first order. He leaves his calling card as a salesman's voice-mail message (“Are you unhappy being stuck in the same old dead-end job? Are other people getting the breaks that you deserve? Is your name Bruce?”); he hides his bright white Almighty suit under his janitor’s overalls and electrician’s gear. He shows Bruce Nolan (Jim Carrey) a file drawer full of Bruce's every thought and deed, then grins when Bruce opens the cabinet and hangs on for dear life as it shoots out, extending its paper collection hundreds of feet at somewhere above the speed limit.
The Almighty, in short, is the sort who would pretend to hand over his powers and retire, while actually just handing over a small portion of Bruce’s native Buffalo and staying on call for emergencies. It’s good theater, it makes a point, and it beats the hell out of actually handing over the planet to a random egomaniacal doofus who reports fluffy “news” for Channel 7.
It also saves the director from figuring out how to portray Bruce dealing with actual omniscience and omnipresence – but seriously, do you have any clue how _you_ would portray omniscience and omnipresence in a movie? I sure don’t. TV has learned to make terrific shows with stars who are tools of God (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the new Joan of Arcadia), but even there God has His fun being cryptic. The Almighty knows how to put on a show? Dude, that’s the one thing we're sure of. Let’s see RuPaul make a sunset.
The second indulgence Bruce Almighty asks is that it hopes you’re as completely freakin’ ignorant of science as everyone in Hollywood is. Bruce’s girlfriend Grace, played by Jennifer Aniston, makes a big deal of how generous she is to donate her “rare blood type”, AB Positive: yes, it’s only 3% of the population, but AB Positives can receive blood from all other blood types, and AB Positives can’t donate to any other blood type, so their blood is the closest the Red Cross sees to useless. (My wife Cindy, type AB Positive, points this out at all blood drives.) Plus it's weird for transfusion recipients to wake up to blood drips where the donated blood type is labeled in huge smiley bold-faced letters.
But that subplot would have worked with O Negative, and I’m sure all kinds of hospital policies can go weird when God is interfering to make a point, so fine. More troublesomely, there’s a scene where Bruce drags the moon closer to his apartment to look more romantic for Grace, and paints a bunch of new stars. If he simply was toying with the window, I’d sigh at the cheesiness and let it go, but then we find out a few thousand people were killed in Tokyo due to weird tides caused when the moon bopped out of orbit. Um… if he was really moving the moon that much closer to Buffalo, the natural disruptions would kill a billion people within a day, and smash hi-tech civilization forever. Regarding another scene, it's my impression – although I'm open to correction – that any meteor large enough to strike earth before fully burning up would hit with the impact of a nuclear bomb, thus damping the value, for a reporter, in being "first on the scene".
And if it was an action movie, that would be enough to make it suck. Armageddon or the Core, based on preposterous emergencies, unworkable solutions, imaginary technologies, and plot twist after illogical plot twist, are useless and offensive. They ask for your emotional involvement in a universe of whim, where no-one can do anything smart or stupid and no actions have consequences, since the only cause of what happens next is whatever idiotic special effect amuses the director.
But Bruce Almighty is a fairy-tale: blood types and meteors are props. If they’re bad props, you can imagine better ones that would’ve served, and mutter about how come you have to do all the goddam work around here, and go back to smiling at the antics of Jim Carrey.
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I adore Jim Carrey. That’s probably a bias. He’s established this alternating career pattern: one moronic movie that makes big money even though he’s not quite enough to justify its existence, then one smart movie that struggles for small profits even though he’s just as funny. The division is rarely subtle. The Cable Guy (still my favorite of his) and the Truman Show were pointed but gentle satires that gave themselves over to the characters and their struggles; Man on the Moon, dramatizing an avant-garde comedian who was considered funny by very few people, was even obscure and arty (and, in my opinion, great). On the other hand, he was Me, and Myself, and Ace Ventura. Bruce Almighty, as lightly supernatural as the same director’s Liar Liar, splits the difference.
Bruce Nolan feels that he is picked on by God. My own dog-eared copy of How to Tell When the Almighty Hates You doesn’t list “You are an upper-middle-class local celebrity whose girlfriend looks like Jennifer Aniston”, but he’s stuck in a job that fits his talents, when he really wants a job that's more glamorous: that happens. As we watch him narrating a story of Buffalo’s Biggest Cookie – coaching the mom-n-pop bakery’s Mom into a story behind the cookie that doesn’t include the words “Board of Health”, wincing as the Pop says “What?, I work in the back, I don’t see no smiling children” – it’s clear he’s good at this.
Yet I also believe his amibitions, as he puts on Walter Cronkite’s deep craggy voice before the mirror to make Walt compare taglines: “That’s the way it was”, “That’s the way the cookie crumbles”, “That’s the way, uh huh, uh huh, I like it, uh huh”. Americans are supposed to be superstars: it’s what the world knows us for. Of course Bruce, a shoddy discount dwarf star, feels miscast. It doesn’t help that traffic is awful, that his co-workers tease him, or that his dog only pees in the house and never in the yard (Jim is one of few actors who could make “Fine, let’s go back in so you can shiit” charming). God is the only entity given simultaneous power over traffic, job promotions, and dog poop – you’d never see Batman putting up with that multitasking – so of course Bruce gets all yelly at God. Hence the offer to remake Buffalo (and its skies) the Bruce Nolan way.
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I really like the film’s comedy. Bruce, summoning divine wind, parts a bowl of tomato soup; he salvages a blandly goofy TV report by finding the body of Jimmy Hoffa, who “miraculously died with both his birth certificate and a complete set of dental records in hand”. He is self-interested, angling for the anchorman position and clear traffic and a look at a cute woman’s panties (“And he saw that it was good”).
The theology and the relationship stories are blander, which is not the same as bad. It turns out that there’s a lot of people in Buffalo, and that they pray a lot, and answering prayers takes a long time even when you move at super speeds. Really!? Who’d’ve thunk?! Peculiarly, not Bruce. There’s also the rule that Bruce has to preserve free will (Bruce: “Can I ask why?” Morgan: “You can! That’s the beauty of it!”). If people have free will, that means Grace has free will: that, strangely, is also a surprise to Bruce. But he’s been through some major changes, and I’m sure most Jeopardy contestants miss questions that, at home, they’d’ve called out correctly in half a second. Okay, whatever: why spoil a fun movie by worrying too much?
The three central messages of the movie are
1. Treat people with consideration.
2. Self-pity is an annoying waste of time.
3. Many of the things you most want in life would probably do more harm than good. (This rule should not keep you from buying the new Dresden Dolls cd).
Those are good messages. The last three paragraphs will contain spoilers about how they’re delivered, so you shouldn’t read them unless you’ve seen the movie, or you won’t see the movie, or you just don’t mind being told things, in advance of the movie, that otherwise you wouldn’t figure out until the movie is ten minutes old.
Did we chase away the anti-spoiler league?
We did? Good, good.
The central messages are true, which counts in the movie’s favor. I like that Bruce ends up at the same job he was squirming away from, realizing that he's doing good as a fabulously talented low-key goofball. What might have made the movie Great would have been taking the messages more seriously. Bruce dies during the movie. It’s a good, solid, dramatic scene, unless it’s as obvious to you as it is to me that God’s gonna revive him. Bruce renounces the love of Grace, wishing her happiness even if it costs him her love: so of course God decides he's reformed, and he gets to make her happy himself. That’s lame.
There's a God, so there could be an afterlife. Bruce could watch Grace find happiness (maybe even with the co-worker he’d used his godly powers to sabotage) and accept it. He could live, but deal with Grace moving on, the way us normal people do when we mess up a good relationship. Even fixing the science: he could find some less egregious way to create massive tidal waves, and the movie could consider a few thousand dead Japs to be _more_ important than whether Bruce says sorry to his co-worker.
I doubt the movie would make as much money that way, though. So hopefully this counts as one of the dumb movies he banks for next time. Cuz as dumb movies go, it’s wiser than most.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
voxpoptart
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Member: Brian Block
Location: Greensboro, NC
Reviews written: 200
Trusted by: 281 members
About Me:
Let's give a big Earth welcome to Everett Block, born 10-26-08. Daddy shall return shortly.
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