I know someone who refuses to watch the delightful new series “Pushing Daisies” because he claims to be dead-set against whimsy. I didn’t get what he meant until I saw Michel Gondry’s new film “Be Kind Rewind,” which illustrates the difference between good and bad whimsy.
In good whimsy — “Daisies,” say, or “Amélie” — you have colorful art direction, larger-than-life characters, and charming but not particularly realistic situations, but it all works because there’s a core of believability to the storytelling. Everything we see may be enchanting and off-kilter and eccentric, but all the delightful filigree is there to serve a plot and bring about a satisfactory resolution to people we come to care about. We want Amélie or the pie-maker to find love, and we believe in their search for it, no matter how storybook-like their surroundings may be.
And then there’s bad whimsy, which brings us to “Be Kind Rewind.” Bad whimsy has all the great art direction and nutty plot setups, but they all get shoehorned into a real-world context, whereby the characters can only exist in this bell jar of kookiness by acting like they’ve all had frontal lobotomies. The protagonists serve the whimsy, and not vice versa, and the ultimate effect is not unlike being trapped inside of a snow globe.
The film stars Jack Black — who needs to find a new shtick, and pronto — as Jerry, a motormouthed mechanic who lives in a ramshackle trailer next to an enormous power converter. His pal Mike (Mos Def, going for low-key but winding up in “Charly” territory) manages the titular video store, which carries nothing but VHS tapes, for reasons that are never explained particularly well but wind up being vital to the plot. While store owner Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) is away, Jerry — who became magnetized after he attempted to sabotage the electrical facility — accidentally erases every tape in the store.
To fix the situation, Jerry and Mike start remaking all the movies in cheapo, analog fashion. (Lots of toy cars and cardboard are involved.) Naturally, these lo-tech remakes become a big hit in the neighborhood, and crowds start lining up for the store, which is threatened with demolition to make way for new condos.
There’s a germ of a funny idea here, and the fake movies were obviously the only reason that Gondry wanted to make the film, since they’re the only interesting thing that happens.
If you saw Gondry’s film “The Science of Sleep,” where Gael García Bernal’s character created TV sets out of cardboard and dreamt of a life-size stuffed horse made of socks and fabric scraps, you’ll know the aesthetic at play here. Using found objects to recreate everything from “The Lion King” to “2001,” the fake-movie vignettes are a delight to watch, and they would have made for great music videos (the medium where Gondry first became famous) or short films. What they don’t do is hold together a movie where the characters are forgettable and the situations are contrived. You’ll enjoy fast-forwarding to them when the film comes out on DVD or cable, but feel free to skip everything in between.
Working with someone else’s script, Gondry gave us the wonderful “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” but writing for himself, we get twee movies like this and “Sleep.” Gondry’s a visual genius, but he needs to consider stepping away from the word processor.