Talk about meeting cute. The male and female leads of Pixar's The Incredibles — who both happen to be costumed crimefighters endowed with amazing superpowers — first lay eyes on one another in the heat of battle, and immediately begin generating romantic sparks. The sparks are real, but the meeting is something else. As it turns out, the flirtatious super-heroes are already well acquainted — in fact, they're scheduled to be married that very afternoon — and we get the feeling that their little act of pretending not to know one another is a private ritual probably played out many times before. There's something very sweet about it, with maybe just the slightest whiff of kinkiness.
He's more powerful than a speeding locomotive and she can stretch her body into an infinite variety of shapes, but the little love game played by Mr. Incredible and ElastiGirl is an all-too human one. That's worth noting, since The Incredibles marks the very first time that Pixar, who have previously invested fish, bugs and tiny bits of plastic with human speech and emotions in animation classics such as Toy Story, Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo, have taken on real live human beings.
Sure, we've seen the occasional human pass through Pixar's other offerings, but this time out they're the whole show. In honor of the occasion, Pixar has opted for a slightly (but only slightly) more sophisticated, pop-culture savvy approach, and called upon director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant and The Simpsons) to call the shots. And although it's become something of a cliché to say this about each new Pixar release, the results are pretty darned magical.
After that opening sequence (packing in more story and clever gags in six minutes than many movies do in two hours), The Incredibles skips ahead 15 years, to a time when runaway litigation suits — from victims claiming they didn't want to be saved — have forced bona fide super-heroes out of business. Mr. Incredible, now a middle-aged married-with-children type known as Bob Parr, spends his days shuffling paperwork for an insurance company, and struggling to suppress his superpowers and heroic impulses, the better to fit in with the apathetic, soul-crushing world around him.
It's a tall order. Mr. Incredible is a larger-than-life guy who can barely squeeze into his rickety little Honda, after all, and watching his massive superbulk hunched over a computer in his tiny cubicle of an office, we just know this is someone made for bigger things. When a mysterious messenger seduces Mr. I back into the super-heroing biz, and then into harm's way — a predicament from which, naturally, only the rest of his super-family can save him — those big things happen, in spades.
The Incredibles mines some familiar movie models — three parts action blockbuster to two parts classic spy flick, shaken not stirred, and complete with cool gadgets, dastardly arch-nemesis and a groovy Goldfinger-esque score. Like all of Pixar's little animated opuses, however, it is also essentially a love letter to the family unit, and although this smart and very funny movie's emotional center might be a touch less overtly warm and fuzzy than something like, say, Nemo, it still gets the job done nicely. Mr. Incredible and company are cartoons (and highly stylized ones at that), but they're also every bit as annoyingly, endearingly human as just about any family you'll see on screen.
Beyond that, the movie is filled with some spectacular animation and expertly realized action sequences, culminating in a final, Spy Kids-like blowout where each family member gets a chance to strut his or her superstuff. That includes pre-teen daughter Violet, who doesn't just shrink, but disappears, literally — after all, she's the Invisible Girl. Like many girls her age, Violet is painfully self-conscious and wears her hair in her face as if she wants to hide from the world. Empowering her via her own invisibility might just be The Incredibles' most clever metaphor, but it's only one perk in a movie that contains many.
So, what do an animated action-comedy about a family of super-heroes and a drama about a middle-aged abortionist in postwar London have in common? As it turns out, lots.
For one thing, that same, unwavering affection for the extraordinary abiding within the ordinary infuses both The Incredibles and Vera Drake, the powerful new film from English director Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lies). On the surface, Vera (Imelda Staunton), Leigh's eponymous heroine, seems about as ordinary as you can get. She's a working-class wife and mom, puttering about town with a cheerful smile on her face, making small talk and offering up the ubiquitous cup of tea (the chicken soup of England), and often found on her hands and knees humming as she scrubs the homes of the wealthy.
On other days, Vera Drake applies that same pleasant, positive manner to the abortions she secretly performs, free of charge, for various victimized singles and married women who simply can't afford another mouth to feed. She may not be a super-hero exactly, but she's not far from being a saint.
Vera Drake is a fairly conventional movie for Leigh — there's a plot here, and it hinges on Vera eventually being caught and put on trial for her "crime" — but the film is primarily a character study, grounded in the remarkable performances and unerring sense of observation that mark the director's best work. Almost all of the characters are beautifully drawn, as in most Leigh films, all the way down to the supporting and bit parts. Truth be told, there are no bit players in a good Mike Leigh film (and this is certainly one). Though they may receive less screen time, Vera's stooped, self-effacing daughter, Ethyl (Alex Kelly), and Ethyl's soft-spoken fiancée, Reg — so brittle he might shatter under a strong gust — are just as important to the movie's ensemble as Vera herself.
Leigh gets considerable mileage from playing with the subtle and not-so subtle differences between the various classes (and, in fact, sexes) on display in the film, frequently cutting back and forth to great effect between their respective worlds. The director seems equally at home in the tea salons and drawing rooms of the upper crust as he is in the dingy kitchens of working stiffs, although his affections clearly appear to reside more with the latter. There's a political agenda to be found if you look closely enough at Vera Drake, but Leigh isn't interested in forcing it on us. The movie is as carefully balanced as it is nuanced, and as far as what it has to say about the world's political and moral dilemmas, Vera Drake is as firmly swathed in shades of grey as the familiar London skies that hover over its characters.
The movie is not without its miscalculations, but they're mostly minor. The director sometimes verges on over-sentimentalizing one or two of his salt-of-the-earth types, and a heavenly choir that accompanies some key moments manipulates our emotions a bit too aggressively. Then there's the film's entire third act, a downward spiral so unrelentingly grim it provides fodder for shortsighted critics who like to think of Leigh as a one-note master of the bleak.
In reality, when Leigh is at the top of his game, as he frequently is in Vera Drake, few filmmakers can match his richly detailed and often deeply funny portraits of human beings and their foibles. The charge of gloominess is one that Leigh is acutely aware of, I suspect, and when Vera Drake gets too oppressive, we often sense the director going out of his way to lighten up. At one such point he even cuts away to give us a shot glorying in the faces of Vera and her husband, laughing helplessly as they sit in a movie theater gazing up at the shenanigans taking place on the screen. It's a lovely little scene that can't help but evoke a similarly memorable moment in Preston Sturges' Sullivan's Travels, but Leigh makes it all his own — and, in the process, sets everyone's priorities straight, including his own.
lance.goldenberg@weeklyplanet.com or letters@weeklyplanet.com
This article appears in Nov 3-9, 2004.