| I’ll be the first to admit my skepticism when I read the announcement several years back that Disney was planning on turning some of its older animated films into live-action remakes. It felt at the time like a lazy cash-grab to capitalize on title familiarity and little else; with all the new stories waiting to be told, why did we need new takes on these? I’ll also be the first to admit when I stand corrected, and so far, Disney has produced a winning record with this series, turning out three films so far, each of which has been significantly better than the original it remade. Looking back now, I see that Disney did two smart things in launching this slate of films: First, they chose titles that were familiar, but were not some of the company’s best work, and second, they entrusted the remakes to interesting directors who might offer a unique spin on the material. The first remake, Cinderella (2015), updated the stodgy 1950 animated film through the lens of Kenneth Branagh’s classical romanticism, while the second, The Jungle Book (2016), took advantage of Jon Favreau’s experience with both big-budget action films and comedies to turn the 1967 animated film into a full-blooded epic that also managed to rework the racist subtext of Rudyard Kipling’s original story. And now we have Pete’s Dragon, a sensitive, moving remake of the goofy 1977 live-action/animation mix, which happened to be the first Disney film with animation that didn’t involve any of the fabled Nine Old Men and was released during a period of economic and creative doldrums at the Mouse House that would extend well into the next decade. The remake of Pete’s Dragon was directed by David Lowery, a filmmaker with only two independent features to his credit: the delicate adolescent drama St. Nick (2009) and the outlaw love story Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013). Both films revealed Lowery to be a director of acute feeling, both emotional and visual, while his work as an editor on Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color (2013) showed that he could be experimental and unorthodox. There is nothing experimental or unorthodox about Pete’s Dragon, but it is a solid piece of feel-good entertainment that is decidedly more artful than many probably expected it to be (the same could be said of Branagh’s Cinderella). Lowery and his co-screenwriter Toby Halbrooks (who produced Ain’t Them Bodies Saints) completely rework Malcolm Marmorstein’s 1977 screenplay, which was based on an unpublished story by Seton I. Miller and S.S. Field originally destined for Disney’s 1950s anthology television series. They keep the basic idea of an orphaned adolescent boy befriending a giant green dragon, but little else remains. Lowery and Halbrooks restage the story in what looks to be a general present tense (although there are subtle clues that it might be taking place in the 1970s) in the Pacific Northwest, and they open with an utterly heart-rending prologue that finds 5-year-old Pete riding in the backseat with his parents on vacation just before tragedy strikes, which Lowrey and cinematographer Bojan Bazelli (a veteran of numerous horror and fantasy films like The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, The Ring, and Body Snatchers) stage in a poignant bit of disorienting slow motion that is simultaneously beautiful and horrific. Stranded alone in the wilderness, Pete is almost devoured by wolves before he encounters the dragon he will come to call Elliot, who will stay with him and protect him over the next six years. Elliot is enormous (he’s roughly the size of an 18-wheeler) and can breathe fire, but he has an amiable, dog-like face that can break into a goofy grin that reveals a broken lower canine. Pete grows into an 11-year-old feral child (now played by newcomer Oakes Fegley) who survives in the wilderness with the help of Elliot, on whose back he soars through the air and in whose mossy-furry green arms he sleeps at night. Like Pete, Elliot (who can make himself invisible to avoid detection) is an orphan, so they fundamentally understand each other even if Elliot can’t speak in words. Their interactions have a fundamental poignancy and grace that speaks across divides, and many of the film’s best scenes are almost wordless. Their idyll is broken by the incursion of a logging company that is cutting down trees closer and closer to the cave where Pete and Elliot are living. This eventually brings other people into their otherwise veiled world, including Bryce Dallas Howard’s Grace, a forest ranger whose father, Meacham (Robert Redford), claims to have once seen a dragon in those very woods. Grace is married to Jack (Wes Bentley), who works for the logging company and has an 11-year-old daughter, Natalie (Oona Laurence), who immediately connects with Pete once he is discovered and brought back to their house. Unfortunately, Jack’s brother, Gavin (Karl Urban), who also works for the logging company, is one of the first people to see Elliot and becomes determined the capture him because, well, that’s what people do when they find something new: they try to claim it and make it their own. On the surface, Pete’s Dragon is a classic fairy tale, with its adolescent protagonist, supernatural beast, and conflict between their idyllic hidden world and the work-a-day world of adults who don’t understand or care about the mystical and the magical (Redford’s Meacham, who also narrates the film, acts as a kind of intermediary between the openness of childhood and the repressions of adulthood). Under the surface snake a number of intriguing themes, some more subtle than others. The environmental message is loud and clear, with the logging company and their destructive practices pinned as unambiguously evil, or least irresponsible, while Elliot is depicted as a representative of nature at its best—courageous, protective, loving. Because he can look scary, he is misunderstood as violent and threatening, when it is really men like Gavin who are the purveyors of violence, which we see in the film’s second act when Elliot is captured and confined, stripped of his inherent dignity (something the 1977 animated Elliot never had) and reduced to a chained-up prize, not unlike the great King Kong, a film Pete’s Dragon emulates both narratively and thematically. It’s not a perfect film, as it pushes some emotional buttons too hard and cuts some corners that required a little more care, but otherwise it is hard to think of a recent family-friendly film with more grace and poignancy.
Copyright © 2016 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © Walt Disney Pictures Home Entertainment |
Overall Rating: (3.5)
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