[Deep Focus]
Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride
A-

Living dead girl.

Movie Credits:

Directed by Tim Burton and Mike Johnson

Written by
John August, Pamela Pettler and Caroline Thompson

Characters created by Burton and Carlos Grangel

Cinematography by Pete Kozachik

Edited by
Jonathan Lucas

Music and songs by Danny Elfman

USA, 2005

Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Screened 9/23/05 at National Amusements Greenburgh Multiplex Cinemas, Greenburgh, NY

Reviewed 9/25/05


Big Fish (review)

Planet of the Apes (review)

Sleepy Hollow (review)

Mars Attacks! (review)


 

 


Tim Burton’s reputation for disorganized whimsy bordering on out-and-out mayhem rivals his considerable talents as a pure visual stylist, but his most defining feature may be a conspicuous sentimentality. True, his biggest commercial successes to date are still his Batman movies, which aren’t exactly treacly — but when I think of Burton’s Batman, I always think of that scene in Batman Returns where Michelle Pfeiffer, body sprawled lifeless in a dark Gotham City alleyway after being pushed from a tall building, is revived by the attentions of sleek cats, slinking out of the shadows to tend her wounds. That speaks to Burton’s fundamentally compassionate sensibility, the part of him that sees the stray cats of the world restoring life to pale girls who wear glasses, society’s neglected outsiders taking good, nurturing care of one another. A similar urge is in evidence, I think, in the baldly misanthropic Mars Attacks!, where the smug affluence of politicians and businessmen is vaporized by an earth-invasion force that meets its match when confronted by the elderly, the artists, and the freaks and geeks who eventually inherit the earth.

More recently, Burton’s made moves toward the mainstream — Big Fish, a literary adaptation that was hailed in some circles as a welcome evolution in his work, was actually a near-disastrous apologia for his career to date, as mediocre as Planet of the Apes but more dangerous for its pretensions to what the Janet Maslins of the world think of as quality. And I haven’t yet seen Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but I’m a little afraid of what I’ll find there. So it surprises me that Corpse Bride is such a great old-school Burton film, excellent in its mesh of genuine grimness and spectacular schmaltz — a worldly gothic melodrama with fairy-tale cred to rival that of Edward Scissorhands.

Burton is credited as co-director with Mike Johnson, an animator who worked on The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. One suspects that means Burton called most of the creative shots while Johnson handled the painstaking stop-motion craftsmanship, and the result is striking and assured, clearly a Burtonesque fantasy that’s been executed with a career animator’s panache. Animated in stop motion with a digital still camera, Corpse Bride’s look falls somewhere in between the 2D cel animation so famously abandoned by Disney and 3D CG. On a big screen, it’s fairly magical, the spindly characters flitting between a material world inspired by James Whale and an afterlife that’s more Mario Bava.

Protagonist Victor Van Dort, voiced by Johnny Depp, is a a haplessly sensitive young man who’s about to be married by family arrangement to Victoria Everglot (Emily Watson). He lacks social graces, but has nimble fingers that allow him to plunk out a Danny Elfman tune on the Everglot family piano. This endears him to Victoria, and the joke here is that the arranged marriage is actually a good idea. It’s only when Victor screws up his lines at the wedding rehearsal, thus clearly failing to live up to societal standards of decorum, that he flees to the woods outside of town and, practicing his vows, inadvertently betroths himself to the spectacularly disheveled Corpse Bride (Helena Bonham Carter), who wanders around the ever-after in her wedding dress, bouquet clutched in skeletal hand, several ribs visible through the gaping hole in her flesh just below one breast, desperate for a companion to soothe her tortured soul.

The story of Corpse Bride’s demise is told, in murder ballad fashion, by one of the dancing skeletons who populate the jazz-bar underworld. On a single listen, Danny Elfman’s expository songs don’t seem especially compelling (OK, what I mean to say is they suck), and the big musical numbers aren’t as impressive as they need to be, but they’re kept to a merciful minimum and don’t really recur once the story really kicks into gear — there’s a gold-digging interloper chasing after Victoria in Victor’s absence, and Victor himself is torn between his love for Victoria and an increasing commitment to his Corpse Bride. And that’s the film’s second reversal, and great complication. Even as Victor struggles to find a way back to his dear Victoria, he feels a responsibility toward the broken soul whose purgatory he has momentarily, if accidentally, brightened. How to reconcile his urge toward happiness in the land of the living with his desire to comfort the dead?

There’s no way all of this can culminate in an ending that’s happy, exactly, and instead Burton resolves his story in melancholy fashion. It’s a sign, again, of great compassion for characters struggling with the weight of life, death and cosmic injustice that this film’s final, unexpectedly moving image could be of something so incongruous as a hundred butterflies flitting up, away and into the moonlight. Is it coincidence that Burton’s most striking and emotionally involving movie in ages is his first in more than 10 years that’s not derived from someone else’s material? Please, somebody, keep Burton far, far away from any more franchises, sequels, remakes or adaptations, and make him work for a living. On the evidence here, the world will be richer for it.

DEEP FOCUS: Movie Reviews by Bryant Frazer
http://www.deep-focus.com/flicker/
bryant@deep-focus.com