THE BEAR, THE FROG, THE PIG AND HER LOVER

Having been out of town for the screening of Muppets Most Wanted, I didn’t catch up with the film until The Wife, The Kid and I took in a matinee this past weekend.

Like all Muppets flicks, it certainly has funny moments, but it seemed oddly overlong and overambitious, with an unnecessarily complicated caper-thriller plot. Some of the songs by Bret McKenzie were good, but there were too many of them, too, and none were home-runs. The human stars are Ricky Gervais and Ty Burrell, neither of whom get enough to do, and Tina Fey, who sings surprisingly pretilly as a gulag commandant.

Half Price Books is running a literary sidekick bracket to coincide with March Madness. Neat idea, but some of their candidates don’t seem quite right to me, notably Pepper Potts from the Ironman comics—shouldn’t a love interest automatically disqualify a character from sidekick status?

JANE'S ADDICTION

The mid-‘90s were salad days for Jane Austen fans. 1995 alone saw the release of screen adaptations of Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion, as well as Clueless, that splendid modern-dress teen-comedy adaptation of Emma; a more straightforward version of Emma hit screens the following year.

But ’95 is a banner year for Austen freaks above all, perhaps, because of the BBC television version of Pride and Prejudice, starring Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy. Much as I like Firth, I personally prefer the 2005 big-screen version, with Keira Knightly as Elizabeth Bennett and Matthew MacFayden as Darcy. But Austen fanatics, I understand, overwhelmingly prefer Firth’s dour interpretation.

This is certainly the case with Jane Hayes, the heroine of the new film Austenland. Jane (Keri Russell), an American who sleeps in a bedroom full of 18th-Century-style kitsch, owns a cardboard cutout of Firth in his Darcy get-up—a departing boyfriend punches this two-dimensional rival in the kisser.

Now in her 30s, Jane’s pretty sure that her Austen fixation isn’t getting her anywhere. Nonetheless, she invests her meager life savings on a trip to England, to a theme resort in a beautiful country manor that offers an immersion in period role-playing for Austen freaks, with actors playing variously dashing or snobbish or buffoonish types in the author’s vein. Once Jane gets there—after walking through the terminal at Heathrow in Regency drag—the Boss Lady (Jane Seymour) coldly makes it clear that her budget package puts her squarely in “poor relation” territory in terms of the experience.

In other words, though unwittingly, she finds herself in the position of an Austen heroine. And like such a heroine, she soon finds potential romance—both with a “stable boy” (Bret McKenzie) and with a starchy, Darcy-ish “officer” (J. J. Feild). But where, if at all, does fantasy end and true love begin?

Based on a 2007 novel by Shannon Hale, Austenland was co-written (with Hale) and directed by Jerusha Hess, half of the husband-and-wife team that made Napoleon Dynamite, Nacho Libre and the underrated Gentlemen Broncos. The theme—American Anglophilia—is a promising one for an eccentric romantic comedy. It’s even a bit timely, considering the recent Yank media preoccupation with the new Whelp of Windsor.

The movie also has the benefit of beautiful Keri Russell, an actress who isn’t used as often or as well as she could be—her last real triumph was in Adrienne Shelly’s superb Waitress in 2007. Russell isn’t showy, but there’s a directness to her, and she has an open, responsive romantic manner. In her scenes with the guys here, Jane wears a living-in-the-moment smile of delight simply that something is going on in her life, and she’s quite beguiling.

Russell also rescues the film from utter triviality. Magnificent as Jane Austen’s novels are, there’s something irritating about modern women using these stories, in which near-powerless women can be banished to scorn and irrelevance if they fail to obtain a marriage, as fantasy fodder—willingly embracing social strictures to which Austen, with all her briliance and imagination, had little choice but to conform.

I don’t know if Hale’s novel touches on this, but in the movie it shows up only tacitly, in the liberating use of Nelly’s “Hot in Herre” on the soundtrack, and more importantly in the way Russell’s Jane seems to recoil from even play-acting these situations once she’s in them. (A friend of mine went to Afghanistan as a journalist, and was surprised at how demeaning she found the requirement that she keep her head covered.)

Russell can’t save Austenland, sad to say. After a pretty amusing initial setup, the film just doesn’t come together. Much of the comedy in the Hess pictures arises from a sort of wobbly, not-firing-on-all-cylinders timing to the gags. It can be devastatingly funny when it works, as in Napoleon Dynamite, or in the rather hilarious amateur play sequence in Austenland. But this comic style is always in danger of deflating, and it does so, big time, in Austenland’s homestretch.

The later scenes, which try to resolve the romance through various revelations and declarations, fall with a thud. They aren’t funny, they aren’t romantic, for me they weren’t even fully coherent. And they’re only poignant in an external sense—you feel a little bad for the actors, trying like crazy to make this stuff work, while Hess’s camera stares unhelpfully at them.

Austenland is a mess, and for me it failed altogether as a romance, but it’s by no means without laughs. Aside from Russell’s performance, my favorite aspect of the film is the performance of Jennifer Coolidge as Elizabeth Charming, a game middle-aged party girl who befriends Jane. Elizabeth Charming doesn’t know the difference between Jane Austen and Austin, Texas; she went to the resort because she knows the Empire dresses will show her figure off to good advantage.

But she dives right into the spirit of the resort, spouting ridiculous improvisation in an absurd accent, and trying to get everyone involved in the fun. Miss Charming is shameless, but she’s just trying to help things along, and the same could be said for Coolidge.

BESTIES

The 2012 Oscar nomination were announced this morning. I was particularly delighted by the nomination of “Man or Muppet” from The Muppets for best song.

RIP to Joe Paterno, passed on at 85. It’s hard not to see something classically tragic in his fall—shortly after being celebrated as the most successful NCAA Division 1 coach ever, he was disgraced & fired in about a week, & dead two months later. This doesn’t strike me as a fate worse than, say, having no one seem to give a shit when you get raped by an old man at the age of ten. But it’s still a shocking twist.

RIP also to powerhouse Etta James, passed on at 73.

SOCKO BOX OFFICE

“The characterizations were amusing, but they always reminded me of bad carpeting.” Thus did a curmudgeonly friend of mine recently explain why he never liked the Muppets.

It is, to put it mildly, a minority opinion. The Muppets are one of those rare acts that operates squarely in the mainstream of wholesome, family-approved entertainment, yet has just the right edge of pure, irresistible silliness to make them hip—& maybe the faintest hint of kinkiness as well, as in Gonzo’s masochism & his seemingly polygamist interest in chickens. Almost everybody, Your Humble Narrator included, loves the Muppets. Indeed, their low-tech, old-school showbiz tactility is one of the keys to their charm—many of us love them because they remind us of bad carpeting.

For the newest film version, however, the Muppets have been recast as underdogs, has-beens. The premise of The Muppets is that Kermit, Fozzie, Piggy, Animal et al are forgotten relics of the ‘80s. When Kermit, lonely behind the gates of his faded Bel-Air mansion, learns that a rotten one-percenter named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) wants to tear down the old Muppet Studios to drill for oil, he gets together the old gang to put on a telethon to save them.

This formula Let’s-Put-On-Show plot is really secondary, however, to the story of Walter, a fanatical Muppets fan who is, manifestly, also a Muppet himself (voiced by Peter Linz). This is doubly odd because Walter’s brother Gary (Jason Segel, who also co-scripted, with Nicholas Stoller), is human, as is Gary’s girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), as is everyone else we see in their smalltown home. So when the three of them travel to L.A. & get caught up in the Muppet’s adventures, Walter feels truly at home for the first time.

At one point Walter gushes to the Muppets that they give people the greatest gift, laughter, & the Muppets protest, pointing out at least two greater gifts. But the third-greatest gift is nothing to be sneezed at, & The Muppets delivers a generous dose of it. The screening audience with whom I saw the film received it rapturously; I enjoyed it greatly but I think it’s the third-greatest Muppet movie, after the sublime Muppet Christmas Carol of 1992 & the original 1979 effort, The Muppet Movie.

The script is laced with in-jokes & period references & parodies of dramatic clichés, genuinely witty but aimed more, perhaps, at nostalgic adults than at the kids in the audience, as are the many, many celebrity cameos. Also, the movie seems—and this isn’t a criticism I find myself handing down very often—a little talky.

Don’t get me wrong—the upsides of The Muppets far outweigh these minor reservations. They include: Cooper, who’s pretty droll in the obligatory bad guy part, & who delivers a sensational rap; the new songs, by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Conchords, working in the style, if not quite on the level, of Paul Williams, & the old songs, including “The Rainbow Connection” & Piero Umiliani’s unshakeable “Mahna Mahna.” This movie even found, at last, a redemptive good use for that horribly catchy ‘80s embarrassment “We Built This City.”

Finally, there’s Kermit, pained & sheepishly idealistic as ever. Steve Whitmire still reproduces Jim Henson’s voice characterization flawlessly, & whoever actually operates Kermit gets extraordinarily fine shades of feeling on his face. Many a highly-paid non-amphibian star doesn’t have nearly as expressive a pan.