Thursday.May.08.2008

REVIEW: Speed Racer (2008)

By Arya Ponto

"This could change everything," the kitschy-named Inspector Detector (Benno Fürmann) tells the mysterious Racer X (Matthew Fox). "It already has," said the masked racer, optimistic.

They were referring to the efforts of Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch), the gifted young racecar driver, to revolutionize the sport of racing. Yet I couldn't help but feel that it's really the Wachowskis, meta-talking about the art of filmmaking; the wink-wink moment being the scene where Mom (Susan Sarandon) tells Speed that when she watches him drive, it's like watching him make art. Speed Racer revolutionizes filmmaking by way of not following any standard movie template. The result is unlike anything that anyone had ever seen before.

The look of the film is astonishing in its kaleidoscopic frenzy—like the wet dream of a tie-dye shirt—but what enhances the outright madness of the film is the way the Wachowskis employ cinematic techniques usually reserved for Japanese cartoons or an Adult Swim commercial on acid. I'm talking speed lines, collages, cutouts of people swooping across the screen as shot transitions, bending landscapes, and in perhaps the film's most bizarre sequence… multiple floating heads of the same two characters filling the screen as they converse. One fight scene is spectacularly filmed: the camera stops on each character just enough for them to show off one move. This sort of replicates the effect used by budget-constrained anime to cheat out of animating fights, when they would just have a still image over speed lines with the camera jerking around. The film is even edited dynamically, methodically inserting flashbacks and flashforwards during scenes, deliberately making the film more chaotic than it looks.

Rabid eye-candy aside, they actually took the film seriously. All the actors (except maybe the monkey) played their roles straight, despite looking like extras from Pee-Wee's Playhouse, spouting cheeseball lines like "It doesn't matter if you don't change racing, what matters is that racing changes you." It's a feat worth applauding when the insertion of the original cartoon's famously random "Ohh!" and "Aah!" felt natural. The Wachowskis also developed the Racer family, adding regret as motivation and putting forth familial bond as the film's quintessential theme.

You wouldn't expect a $120 million Joel Silver CGI spectacle to be a counterculture art project, but Speed Racer very much is. In the film, the world of racing is corrupted, full of headhunters and corporate shills, controlled and rigged only to serve the real trophy: the stock market. Wins and losses are determined not by racers, but men in suits looking to negotiate fuel brands. Speed, representing the independent and family-owned car company Racer Motors, is an anomaly and a wild card—making him the target for corporate takeovers and race-related sabotage. Speed Racer, of course, is a summer populist film backed by a large corporation (Time Warner)—there's no delusions there—but it does strangely radiate an independent spirit, if not from its production aspect then from its sheer zeal.

Then again, the Wachowskis have always been mischievous storytellers. The Matrix Reloaded should have been an easy reap—a sequel to a big hit, with bigger budget and bigger action sequences—yet what the brothers delivered was a film filled with strife based on philosophical contradictions and a third act climax that's not a badass gunfight, but rather a labyrinthine conversation that could've used some subtitles. Speed Racer is more or less the same kind of mischief; the defying of expectations by putting in something so off-putting on the surface, it takes a while to set into its groove.

It's a ballsy film, because it's easy for someone to watch five minutes of it and feel like they're being violently raped by a bubble gum. For the undeterred (and the kids who fake-swallowed their Ritalin), it's a sinfully delirious ride, and hilarious to boot. Where else would you see a little boy and a monkey running rampage on a highway of Segways set to the guitar solo from "Freebird"? Like Pink Floyd's The Wall, its only fault is that it's hard to process such a brilliant sensory overload for such a long period of time (over two hours in Speed Racer's case). There's not a word that my bilingual self could employ that would truly describe what an odd experience it is to watch this movie. The Wachowskis didn't bring an anime to life. What they did was throw the audience into an anime. I'll leave it to you to discern the difference.

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