MICMACS
Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Produced by Frédéric Brillion, Gilles Legrand & Jeunet
Written by Jeunet & Guillaume Laurant
Released by Sony Pictures Classics
French with English subtitles
France. 104 min. Rated R
With Danny Boon, André Dussollier, Nicolas Marie, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Yolande Moreau, Julie Ferrier, Omar Sy, Dominique Pinon, Michel Cremades & Marie-Julie Baup

It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for arms manufacturers lately. In film, they’ve become the easy fall guys for the world’s messy geopolitical conflicts. Such is the case in the latest by director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (of Amélie fame), with its view of the military-industrial complex so simple-minded it makes Iron Man 2 seem like a Council on Foreign Relations symposium.

Micmacs follows good-natured Everyman Bazil (comedian Danny Boon), whose life has been ruined by random encounters with French-made weaponry. As a kid, his soldier dad was blown up by a landmine. Later, outside the video store where Bazil works, a stray bullet from a drive-by shooting gets lodged in his brain.

After recovering from his wounds, he finds himself out of a job and living on the streets. (The bullet allows for a decent gag: to prevent it from killing him, he has to engage his brain by remembering oddball trivia, such as how various famous Frenchmen died.) But one day, an ex-con named Slammer, who, in one of the film’s many clever touches, is supposedly one of only two to ever survive the guillotine, welcomes him into his junkyard fortress.

It’s inhabited by one of those gangs of lovable misfits where each has a special ability that also defines his or her personality—one young woman, the Calculator (Marie-Julie Baup), can instantly figure out the numerical properties of any object; another, Tiny Pete (Michel Cremades), makes scrappy robots; and Dominique Pinon’s Buster (the movie loves its silent film homages) is a human cannonball. Each skill will eventually help Bazil in his quest to bring down the two rival arms dealers, set up conveniently across the street from each other. One made the mine that killed his dad and the other, the slug left in his skull.

The movie is enjoyable enough. Bazil, a cross between Jeunet’s freelance do-gooder Amélie and Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, works the two arms dealers off each other through creative mischief. He destroys one’s collection of famous body parts—including Mussolini’s eye—and burns the other’s sports cars, making each one think the other was responsible.

With fussed-over compositions and larger-than-life colors—memorably, radioactive greens—Micmacs (shortened from the original French title Micmacs à tire-larigot, old slang for roughly “a hell of a lot of weird goings-on”) is a live-action cartoon. There’s even a scene where an explosion at an arms factory knocks the clothes off a woman on a pin-up calendar. (The music, largely drawn from Max Steiner’s score from The Big Sleep, adds to the film’s retro, caper-ish feel.)

Many gags are inspired, but as with Tim Burton, a director Jeunet in many ways resembles, the distinctive, inventive visual style and somewhat dark wit can’t completely mask the treacly preciousness at its core. And while realizing it’s just action-packed mayhem—there’s even a clip from a Tex Avery cartoon to hammer the point home—I find the cartoonish morality grating. The accomplishments of Bazil and his gang start out merely self–congratulatory, but by the end, when we see presumably genuine pictures of children injured in war, the otherwise lightweight hijinks turn stomach-turning. Come on: the idea that arresting arms dealers or bringing down their factories, as in this movie, will somehow work towards ending human conflict is also wishful thinking of the most uncomplicated sort. Brendon Nafziger
May 28, 2010