What is it about New York suits that makes Hollywood execs look down on them so? Is it the way that they are so consumed with their professional lives that they completely ignore their own families? Or do they simply make convenient enough targets for reform without hitting too close to home? Either way, they keep coming with ways for them to be taught basic life lessons by children, animals, or irritating faux-human caricatures, the inner facets of whom are generally interchangeable. It was a successful enough formula when applied to dramatic actors like Cary Grant, who were able to stretch comedic mileage by ruffling their handsomely preened feathers, but when applied to more modern comedic stars, it tends to come up short. This probably has something to do with their more manic style, and in the case of Jim Carrey, that goes triple.
Mr. Popper (Carrey) is one of those Gordon Gekko-types who lives in a gorgeous high-rise apartment, and shouts things at an overwhelmed assistant (Ophelia Lovibond). His success, naturally, comes at the price of his estranged family’s love, being his wife Amanda (Carla Gugino) and his two children. Just as he’s about to be made partner at his hilariously generic New York firm, his long-absent boat captain father dies, leaving him his final Earthly possessions: six penguins, in no way trained or adjusted to living in the civilized world. At first, he sees them as a nuisance, as they cheerfully defecate across every available surface in his home, but gradually, well, you know where this is going, and it would really only be a spoiler if I said anything else.
Bringing Up Baby worked because the normally suave and sophisticated Cary Grant broke under the dual menace of a leopard and Katherine Hepburn, his cool demeanor that seemed at home in Notorious broken into a mess of babbling nonsense. There was palpable frustration there, and watching him fail to say the exact right thing had the same kind of cathartic glee as throwing pudding at the Mona Lisa. Jim Carrey, however, starts every scene at 11 and doesn’t stop until he hits an obstacle, which apparently not even penguins provide. Even if it’s a cliché, there’s something inherently true about the straight man/funny man dynamic, but who really went to this movie wanting to see a bunch of wild animals play second banana? An actor like George Clooney or Clive Owen could have perhaps pulled it off more effectively, but that’d be a different film altogether.
It’s perhaps worth noting, just to be as big a stick-in-the-mud as possible, just how irresponsible the “let’s have wild animals in our home” subgenre is (because it hasn’t taken enough crossfire this week, let’s bring We Bought A Zoo into it). One would think that an Ohio man committing suicide before opening the gates to his private zoo (which of course led to the death of a number of those animals) and a woman literally getting her face ripped off by a chimpanzee would give people pause, but apparently not. There seems to be a willful conspiracy on the part of Hollywood to convince families that they, not trained professionals, are the rightful caretakes of undomesticated animals, and are able to do a better job simply because they find them cute. Life has proven that the danger and naivete of this attitude really can’t be overstated, but Mr. Popper’s Penguins willfully ignores this message, finding its primary villain in a wildlife official (Clark Gregg) who correctly points out that they don’t know anything about how to take care of penguins, and ruins a family project by noting that they will die under their care. The conclusion conveniently (and understandably) sidesteps all of those problems, but the nagging voice of implausibility is just a little bit louder here than you might like.
SPECIAL FEATURES
In this three disc set, all of the extras are contained on the Blu-ray (rather than the DVD or the digital copy). They include an animated short called "Stinky and Nimrod's Antarctic Adventure, some deleted scenes, a gag reel, a short featurette on the "Legacy of Mr. Popper's Penguins", another called "Ready For Their Close-Up" about working with the penguins, another called "Ladies and Gentoomen" about penguins in general, and yet another called "Stuffy Penguin Theater" about the use of CGI in the film. There are also two separate audio commentaries, the theatrical trailer, the first few pages of the original book, and some live extras available through an internet connection. All in all, a pretty well-loaded set.
"Mr. Popper's Penguins" is on sale December 6, 2011 and is rated PG. Children & Family. Directed by Mark Waters. Written by Sean Anders, John Morris, Jared Stern. Starring Angela Lansbury, Carla Gugino, Clark Gregg, Jim Carrey, Madeline Carroll, Ophelia Lovibond.
