'Gulliver's Travels' (English, Fantasy, 2011)
Director: Rob Letterman
Cast: Jack Black, Jason Segel, Emily Blunt
After 'Alice in Wonderland' and, now, Rob Letterman’s 'Gulliver’s Travels', it appears that the season for diluting surreal literature into 3D-ready family fodder is upon us.
And it would seem to fall upon the critic, that grumpy gatekeeper of the arts, to bemoan the coarsening of our already coarsened culture.
Why, we might ask, do filmmakers insist on refashioning classics into shapes and forms that do not require (or reflect meaningfully upon) the originals in the first place?
If you need a little girl to traipse about a post-apocalyptic land that evokes anything but wonder, why not draft a story from scratch, populating it, along the way, with creepy-crawly beasties summoned from the CGI artist’s imagination? Why invoke Carroll? Likewise, if the intent is simply to transform Jack Black (as Gulliver) into a leviathan amidst the little people of Lilliput, why not outline a story about... Jack Black as a leviathan amidst little people? Why summon up the satiric spirit of Jonathan Swift?
The answer, as any marketing man will tell you, is high-recall brand value.
Carroll and Swift bring with them generations of fond association, and that kind of prefab publicity cannot be manufactured from ground up. The day may not be far off when the knights of the Round Table are stripped of savagery and soul-searching and reduced to high-spirited jousters who can poke a three-dimensional spear right between our eyes — spectacle with spectacles, that’s all literature is going to be good for.
But all that hand-wringing apart, it’s a relief to report that Gulliver’s adventures are not as joyless as Alice’s, and that Letterman is at least alert to the anarchic talents of his leading man. A little Jack Black can often go a long way, but a big Jack Black can clearly go a little further — already a man-child in most of his movies, his bigness, here, literally renders him a child. Lilliput is his playroom and the Lilliputians his toys.
Gulliver’s Travels is a silly movie that’s more than a little aware of its silliness. There’s a childlike transparency about its purpose. I wouldn’t say I was terribly entertained, but I suspect children might take to its gleeful stomping over all things adult — including the carping over the travesty of a book they’ve barely heard of (this, after all, is an adaptation where Gulliver pees all over a palace fire to extinguish it, and later, refers to someone as an “angry little dingleberry.” I think it’s safe to assume that Swift passed on without ever learning what that meant).
The film even takes a swipe at adult words. At one instance, the Lilliputian princess (Emily Blunt) declares to Gulliver that she’s forlorn. He wonders about the meaning of the word, if it is like sad. She replies, “Basically! It’s just a little more dramatic sounding.”
The story begins as a sort of romcom. Gulliver works at a newspaper’s mailroom, and his lowly station leaves him unable to do anything about his crush on Darcy (Amanda Peet, playing the newspaper’s travel editor; travel editor, in case you need a nudge in the ribs.) A coworker sneers to Gulliver, “You’re never really going to get any bigger than this.”
So of course, he becomes bigger — literally. An assignment to the Bermuda Triangle strands him in Lilliput (Brobdingnagians and Yahoos were presumably left for possible sequels).
With the ensuing procession of pop-culture riffs (on 'Star Wars' and Titanic, among others) and generically rendered battle sequences, the question seems not so much why this film needed Swift as why it needed 3D.
Even the face-off with a giant robot (I kid you not) played better in the 'Transformers' movies, in mere 2D. The answer, as any marketing man will tell you, is increased ticket prices. Audiences, apparently, will fork over good money to have things thrust right into their faces, even if it’s just Jack Black’s plumber’s crack.