Jim Ridley
The incredibles
Dir.: Ross McElwee
NR, 107 min.
Opening Friday at the Belcourt Theatre
To say The Incredibles is the weakest of Pixar Studios' six features only shows how high the animation company has set its own bar. By weakest, I mean that the jokes average about four or five a minute, not 10; and the movie takes about 45 minutes, not 15, to reduce you to tears of laughter or emotion. Anyone but the makers of the Toy Story movies and Finding Nemo could rest a career on this spilling suitcase of delights. Had any other animation studio made this—that means you, DreamWorks—it could point to a major breakthrough. For Pixar, The Incredibles is merely another classic on arrival.
A dazzling saga of deep-cover super-heroism in suburbia, The Incredibles resembles a 'toon version of James Cameron's True Lies: dull dad leads a secret life of danger, while his homemaker wife tends the kids and worries he's having an affair. The gimmick is that they're all crime fighters with super-powers, banished into a relocation program by a society that thinks it doesn't need saviors. The former Mr. Incredible (voice of Craig T. Nelson) has gone to flab in a miserable insurance job, while the erstwhile Elasti-Girl (a perfectly exasperated Holly Hunter) uses her rubbery limbs only to pry apart screaming kids.
The first half of The Incredibles is situation comedy with a wide streak of pathos, as Mr. and Mrs. Incredible recall their glory days like a football star and a prom queen whose lives didn't turn out happily ever after. With the arrival of a jilted fan who declares a jihad on the very idea of heroism, the movie shifts into giddy action-thriller gear, converting Pixar's customary slapstick-contraption climax into a high-gloss James Bond parody. I'm not sure how kids will react, especially to the first half; the movie is more adult in tone and texture (and more video-game violent) than anything the studio has tried before. A former Simpsons gag-man, writer-director Brad Bird also made the ambitious animated drama The Iron Giant, and with it The Incredibles shares an unexpectedly dark undercurrent about the burden of exceptional ability and the existence of implacable evil.
Not even Pixar has licked the plastic lifelessness that plagues human figures in digital animation; it's hard to register complex emotions on faces as round and shiny as Rolie Polie Olie's. But that doesn't muffle the movie's energy and comic invention. There's a throwaway gag here that's peerless Pixar: dad and mom argue directions behind the wheel of a Winnebago, while the kids act up in the background. It's a typical scene—only, one kid is invisible, the Winnebago is hitched to a rocket jet and the world hangs in the balance. Like the studio's best work, the gag finds the exact proportion of ordinary in the extraordinary, and vice versa. The Incredibles isn't just the story of superheroes getting their groove back. It recognizes that anyone who pulls off the task of parenting deserves a place in the Justice League.
