Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Wow. I mean... just... wow. I thought I laughed when I read the brilliant Elvis Mitchell review for this thing, but once again, our resident expert on truly horrible movies has stepped up to the plate, leaned in, and taken the ball directly to the forehead. He jumped in front of the train. He took the bullet. He saw this one so you don’t have to.
There are spoilers a-plenty, but if even one-third of what he says is true, sounds like it was spoiled before he got there...
They say the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If that old saying is true then Roberto Benigni’s PINNOCHIO is the Autobahn on which you will spend 90 minutes of your life speeding at a 120 mph into the lake of fire.
There is only one word that can truly sum up Begigni’s PINNOCHIO - catastrophic. The film is a catastrophic disaster of such epic proportions that Irwin Allen could have used it as the basis for one of his all-star disaster pics. It fails on every single level. Nothing works. Nothing. PINNOCHIO aspires to be whimsical, magical, funny, and heartwarming. It fails and fails miserably. Instead the film is annoying, incoherent, unfunny, and virtually unwatchable. Even the life lessons the story teaches ring hollow. Worst of all, the film is extremely boring.
It really saddens me that PINNOCHIO turned out so badly because I like Roberto Benigni and I loved LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL. Yeah, you heard me. I loved LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL and think it should have won Best Picture. I know there are a lot of people out there who loathe Benigni but I suspect that has more to do with the Hollywood hype machine shoving him down everyone’s throat non-stop from the moment the movie opened through Oscar night than it did simply not liking the movie itself. And let’s face it once Harvey Weinstein anoints you his flavor of the moment it’s hard to remove that stigma. Just look at Gwyneth Paltrow.
I’m sure he also didn’t win over some people by running around the Academy Awards acting like Yakov Smirnoff on a bad acid trip although I personally found that behavior refreshing compared to usual displays of uncontrollable crying or reading of a laundry list of names. However, after sitting through PINNOCHIO, if anyone wants to beat the crap out of Benigni just let me know and I’ll be happy to hold him for you while you punch away.
Once upon a time, a lonely old man named Geppetto carves a marionette boy out of wood. The Blue Fairy brings the puppet to life. Puppet longs to be a real boy. Mischievous puppet gets into trouble. Cricket serves as puppet’s conscious. Puppet’s nose grows when telling a lie. Puppet joins a travelling puppet show. Puppet turns into a donkey. Puppet swallowed by a giant whale. Puppet learns honesty, unselfishness, and right from wrong. Blue Fairy turns puppet into a real boy and everyone lives happily ever after!
As you see, the fairy tale story of PINNOCHIO is a simple one or at least it should have been but Benigni and his screenwriting partner have joined forces to make it virtually incoherent. From the moment that Pinnochio comes to life, which is in the first 5 minutes, the film becomes a rambling mess that could desperately use some Ritalin. Pinnochio’s plot is just a series of misadventures that fall into two categories: those that just begin and end in a matter of moments and those that have a long set-up and then just end without any real resolution. It’s all a whole lot of nothing. The movie has no arc and the misadventures don’t flow. One subplot ends abruptly and another begins. I can’t help but to wonder if the fine folks at MiramAXE who are far wiser than you or I chopped up this movie and did away with certain scenes. If not, that means that the movie really is as poorly written as it appears on screen. Either way, I fear for what the Weinsteins are going to do to SHAOLIN SOCCER. Now compare that simplistic breakdown of the story of PINNOCHIO to the one that Roberto Benigni has given the world.
Blue Fairy enchants a butterfly that then enchants a log. Log rampages through the town’s streets until landing on Geppetto’s doorstep. Lonely old man Geppetto carves a puppet shaped like a 50 year-old Italian out of the log and wishes it was a real son. Puppet comes to life and begins jumping around like an idiot.
Puppet steals father’s toupee and runs amok through the streets doing his DROP DEAD FRED impression. Father sends puppet to school. Puppet sells schoolbooks for money. Puppet tries to join travelling circus rather than going to school. Puppet begs for money. Puppet meets two thieves known as The Cat and The Fox who seek to rob puppet. Puppet gets chased by The Cat and The Fox who dress as klansmen. Puppet gets hung from a tree. Puppet meets the Blue Fairy. Puppet’s nose grows when lying but only when in the presence of the Blue Fairy. The Cat and The Fox swindle the stupid puppet out of his money. Puppet throws a hissy fit. Puppet gets imprisoned. Geppetto searches for his puppet son who he misses so much even though they’ve had about 60 seconds of screen time. Puppet befriends a young hooligan in prison. Puppet and his new hooligan friend take turns licking a stolen lollipop. Puppet gets released from prison. Puppet longs for his father even though they’ve had only about 60 seconds of screen time together. Puppet finds out the Blue Fairy is dead. Bird that talks like the waitress on WHAT’S HAPPENING!! tells puppet where he can find his father. Puppet finds father just in time to see him get lost at sea. Puppet contemplates suicide. Puppet finds out the Blue Fairy is not dead. Puppet goes to live with the Blue Fairy. Puppet gets arrested for attempted murder. Puppet escapes. Puppet gets captured by a crazy farmer and forced to work as a guard dog. Puppet escapes again. Puppet forgoes duties to party with hooligan friend. Puppet turns into a donkey. Donkey jumps through flaming hoops at a donkey circus. Donkey gets hurt. Donkey gets tossed into the ocean to drown. Donkey turns back into a puppet. Puppet gets swallowed by a Megalodon shark. Puppet reunites with father in the Meg’s stomach. Puppet and father escape. Puppet earns money by performing backbreaking manual labor while father is bedridden with illness. Puppet’s hooligan friend who also became a donkey dies. Blue Fairy makes puppet a real boy. Blue Fairy also sets them up in a swanky new house and gives Geppetto a full head of hair. Ex-puppet turned real boy goes to school and everyone lives happily ever after! Well, everyone except the kid that died.
Is this the story of PINNOCHIO you remember from your childhood? Is this the story of PINNOCHIO you want your children to remember all their lives? I think not. I’ve heard that Benigni wanted to do a literal translation of the original story of PINNOCHIO. Is the original story really this incoherent?
Even if the story hadn’t been a clusterfuck for the ages the movie still has other serious problems the first of which is that Benigni cast himself as the title character. I’m sorry but Pinnochio should not appear to be almost the same age as Geppetto. Granted Benigni cast adults in all the child roles, but if you pay attention you’ll notice that all the adults playing kids appear to be in their 20s so 50-year old Benigni still stands out awkwardly. It also makes things confusing at times since you’re not always sure who is supposed to be an adult and who is supposed to be a kid. I guess if someone had facial hair or appeared to be over 60 then that person was an adult. The movie tries to explain the adults playing kids concept in the opening narrative, which explains that the story is set in a world where “kids look like adults and adults sometimes act like children.” It still reeks of a vanity project of Benigni’s part to me.
Now to be fair to Benigni, the biggest problem with the movie isn’t his fault but rather lies firmly at the feet of Miramax. PINNOCHIO is dubbed in English as opposed to being in it’s original Italian with English subtitles. The dubbing really isn’t all that bad except for one character. Unfortunately, that one character that is extremely poorly dubbed is the title character himself who is in almost every single scene of the movie. The dub job the studio did for Benigni himself is simply inexcusable. Folks, they hired Breckin Meyer to do Benigni’s voice. You know, Breckin Meyer, the guy from ROAD TRIP who mistakenly sent his girlfriend the video of him having sex with another girl and set out to get it back? You know, Breckin Meyer, one of the stars of RAT RACE? You know, Breckin Meyer, from TV’s INSIDE SCHWARTZ? Yes, that Breckin Meyer! And we the audience are supposed to believe that his twenty-something California surfer dude voice is coming out of the body of a 50-year old Italian? You got Roberto Benigni running around Italy speaking with a voice that sounds like a whiny Stewart Little! From the moment he starts talking, the voice is so grating, so distracting, and so off putting that it makes the film unbearable. And if it wasn’t bad enough that his voice is completely inappropriate for the character, making matters worse is the fact that Meyer does such a horrendous job performing his lines. Regardless of what the emotion is supposed to be, he yells every line and yells them all with the same inflexion in his voice.
There are even lines of dialogue delivered so poorly that I almost wonder if he was doing it sarcastically because even he hated the movie. Either way, it doesn’t matter because it completely ruins the movie and this movie was bad enough to begin with. I swear the kid from GODZILLA VS. MEGALON had a more convincing vocal dub than Roberto Benigni got for this movie. Somebody at Miramax deserves to be publicly flogged for this, but then there are people at MiramAXE that deserve to be flogged for lots of things. And if Benigni actually approved of this dubbing himself then he really doesn’t have anyone to blame but himself.
I also have to mention the other instance of bad dubbing that’s just jarring. That bird who briefly shows up to give Pinnochio directions is voiced by Queen Latifah. While I’m all for colorblind casting, her voice is just way too modern sounding for a fairy tale that is supposed to be set “once upon a time” in the old country.
But even a good dub job wouldn’t have changed the fact that Benigni’s Pinnochio would still be a particularly unlikable character. Begnini plays Pinnochio as an aloof narcissist prone to throwing temper tantrums and at times he’s downright hateful. About a minute after the cricket, who by the way looks like Paul Bartel in a tuxedo with antennae on his head, first introduces himself to Pinnochio, the puppet is chasing him around the room trying to squash him with a mallet. And exactly what purpose the cricket serves in this version of PINNOCHIO is anyone’s guess because all he really does is show up briefly a few times and scold Pinnochio. There’s never any sense of friendship or mentoring, but then how could there be since Pinnochio himself comes across as such an unsympathetic individual. The relationship between the two never really progresses past the attempted insecticide stage.
And what exactly makes Benigni’s Pinnochio a puppet anyway? He just looks like an ordinary man wearing tacky harlequin clothes and a pointy hat. Everyone calls him a puppet but there isn’t anything about him that distinguishes him as such unless you count his poor fashion sense. At least in the Disney animated classic the puppet Pinnochio looked like a living puppet but there are no markings or make-up on Benigni to make him stand out from actual people. Sure he has a little too much pancake on his face but that hardly makes one a wood carving come to life.
At the end when Pinnochio becomes a real boy, he wakes up in a new set of clothes and sees his puppet-self sitting lifeless in a chair across the room. Rather than just make him a real boy the Blue Fairy instead separated the boy and the puppet into two separate entities. Why? Who knows? Maybe its just me but that scene seemed rather unsettling considering how nonchalant he plays his reaction to seeing the now lifeless puppet that was once him or is still him or…see what I mean?
Also, the production design leaves a lot to be desired. It seems as if somebody watched Spielberg’s HOOK, took one look at Never-Never Land, and said, “I want it to look just like that only drearier!” The colors are drab and faded and there’s just way too much brown and beige in this movie. I understand the look they were going for but it still looks too dreary for its own good. The only production design worth complimenting is the Blue Fairy’s mode of transportation. Its a majestic looking ivory carriage drawn by a horde of white mice is the only thing in the movie that seems befitting of a fairy tale. Other than that, PINNOCHIO is a fairy tale utterly devoid of anything that appears magical or wondrous or enchanted.
The only bright spot in the film was the Blue Fairy herself played by Benigni’s real life wife Nicoletta Braschi (Lucky bastard!). She brings a touch of elegance and class with her screen presence and Glenn Close does a fine job dubbing her English speaking voice. If this had been a good rendition of the material she would have made a great Blue Fairy. Too bad her character is also a victim of the muddled screenplay. One moment she’s dead and the next she’s alive? Huh? If she wasn’t dead then why did she lead Pinnochio to believe that she was? Is she really a fairy anyway or just a woman with magic powers? Why does a fairy need a butler? And just how did she know that Geppetto was a lonely old man who wanted a son?
A family with two kids got up and walked out only about 10 minutes into the movie and keep in mind that they’re supposed to be the target audience for this film. I completely understood why they walked out and was tempted to do so myself several times during the film’s first act. In fact, I had to make a conscious effort to force myself to sit through the whole thing. At one point I checked my watch to see how much longer it would be until the torment was over and it turned it had only been 35 minutes.
For a few moments I felt like I was going to cry because I knew that it still had another hour to go and I wasn’t going to allow myself to leave until the closing credits rolled. I’m not exaggerating to be funny. My eyes were actually beginning to well up with tears. PINNOCHIO is the most excruciating movie-going experience I’ve had in ages. Not since TOYS have I not walked out of a movie this bad. I guess I need to take this opportunity to apologize to Steven Seagal and writer/director Don Michael Paul for saying that HALF PAST DEAD was the worst movie of 2002 because PINNOCHIO is just on a whole other plateau of awfulness. At least HALF PAST DEAD didn’t have any aspirations to be anything other than a popcorn film.
Mr. Benigni, you pulled off a minor miracle with LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL but now its time to leave the movie comedian out to make the world a better place crap to Robin Williams. It’s time to go back and do some more screwball comedies like THE MONSTER or just something that isn’t hellbent on making the world a better place through cinema. I know you didn’t intend for PINNOCHIO to turn out so badly but it did so please don’t do it again. If you insist on making another movie based on classic literature, Roberto Benigni’s FRANKENSTEIN seems like perversely entertaining concept to me. On second thought… Whatever you do, NO MORE PINNOCHIO’S!
You know what’s really sad? I probably won’t get another chance to go to the movies until after the first of the year. That means my movie-going year for 2002 will have begun with the hopelessly awful IMPOSTOR and ended with the truly agonizing PINNOCHIO. Now that’s just pathetic. Oh well, so goes the life of a bad movie afficianado. Now when does KANGAROO JACK come out again?
The Foywonder
Doooooooooooooode... talk about taking one for the team. I think Harry and I better start talking about medals for this guy.
"Moriarty" out.
