It’s as big a disappointment as 2014’s cinema can offer, particularly considering the acclaim it’s getting. The Guillermo del Toro-produced/Jorge Gutierrez-directed The Book of Life collides a lot of styles. Gutierrez, a Nickelodeon vet, brings in that channel’s hectic style of animation, with jumbo funny noses, nostrils that look like the twin bores of the Caldecott tunnel, figures that are bulbous yet flat. The only rest in a restless movie, promising romance, but generating endless tiresome spatting, are the scenes in which the characters stand and deliver their tired gags. Despite Mexico’s position in world music, the soundtrack has as its only Spanish tune “Cielito Lindo”—the soundtrack is Baz Lurhmann-worthy dingbat-electicism. Scratch your head while watching a singing toreador perform Radiohead. And it’s served wrapped in a mood-killing framing device about a school field trip to a museum. This business is seemingly just there because someone involved got cold feet about the non-Latino kids watching, or understanding, or caring.
It’s an Orphic myth about a pair of wooden boy-puppets in love with the same girl: one is Manolo (Diego Luna) a peaceful bullfighter who’d rather pick a guitar. The other is his friend since childhood, Joaquin (Channing Tatum), a general’s son destined for a military career. (Channing Tatum; It’s not like people are done complaining about Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil yet.) The object of their affection is the relentlessly feisty Maria (Zoe Saldana), whose deliberate playing of the two men against each other is supposed to be a mark of independence.
More plot: a Greek Gods-style dispute between the Lady of the Land of the Remembered Dead—La Muerte, skullfaced, yet the liveliest thing in the movie, is an elegant calavera catrina voiced by telenovela star Kate del Castillo. She’s involved, for no good reason, with a knob-nosed, skull-eyed monster Xibalba (voiced by Ron Perlman) who presides over the realm of the Forgotten Dead. The two make a wager over the man Maria will choose; when one of them dies, a half hour in, we finally arrive at the fiesta of spirits we wanted to see. Not so fast—a cuddly God-the-Father figure (beard, nightshirt) voiced by Ice Cube barges in to make sure that everything’s not too pagan.
The Book of Life hurts because it’s something you’d love to see done right—what could be more cinematic than the kind of Mexican pride this film summons? It isn’t hard to use the movies to prove what’s said here: that Mexico is the center of the universe. (Given the ever-changing shape of the universe, there’s probably more than one center, but certainly it is a center.) During the framing sequence—indescribably self-congratulatory, oohing and ahing over the story—a little boy asks, “What is it about Mexicans and death?” It’d be really something if this movie could have answered that question, while holding to at least the same seriousness about mortality as the average Doctor Who episode. It would be similarly something if The Book of Life was what we were promised: an animated film with some of the necrotic beauty of The Nightmare Before Christmas, or the Eameses’ 1957 short “Day of the Dead.” The rackety, over-crowded hit is relentless kidstuff: the culture that doesn’t get trampled, gets trampolined.
PG; 95 min.
