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Charles Addams was a visionary artist with a delightfully macabre sense of humor whose cartoons for The New Yorker ran for over fifty years. His characters have proven so popular over the years that they have been adapted into a successful television show (1964-66), two different animated series (1973 and 1992), and a couple of theatrically-released feature length movies (1991 and 1993). It’s difficult to imagine the film career of a genius like Tim Burton without Addams previously providing the template for darkly comic, gothic-fueled entertainment.
The new movie based on his beloved characters, simply titled “The Addams Family”, marks the first time the fictional family has been featured in an animated feature film released directly to movie theaters. It is unfortunate, then, that this new film does so little to add to Addams’ legacy, merely cooking the artist’s inspired vision down into a lukewarm stew.
One accomplishment I’m sure the filmmakers here aren’t proud of is their ability to take an all-star cast loaded with talent and make them as bland as possible. If you had acting talents like Charlize Theron, Oscar Isaac, Chloe Grace Moretz, Martin Short, Alison Janney, Catherine O’Hara, and Snoop Dogg (!) all in the same live action movie, the expectations would be justifiably high. Here, however, the movie’s predictable jokes and lackluster storyline leave the actors with little of value to work with, and they deliver performances as equally unmemorable as the movie itself.
It seems filmmakers Conrad Vernon and Greg Tiernan are guilty of taking Charles Addams originally inspired vision and trying to make it cute enough to appeal to children. It’s a strategy that just doesn’t work- it drains all the edgy, macabre humor from Addams comic and grinds it into an unappetizing pile of mush.
There are momentary highlights, like when Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia Charlize Theron) accidentally hit a pedestrian with their car, look at each other, and exclaim “We hit something!” with enough glee to suggest they just received an early Christmas present. Or when Wednesday wears a brightly-colored pink hair-clip to honor her newfound friendship with Parker (Elsie Fisher), and Wednesday’s mother Morticia is immediately mortified and grounds her primarily for trying to appear too cheerful. These are exceptions rather than the rule, however, as the jokes here are mostly a predictable rehash of Addams’ familiar style, and little that we haven’t heard or seen before.
The movie’s screenplay, courtesy of Matt Lieberman, does make some attempt at satire, as in the sterile portrayal of the manufactured town of “Assimilation” that seems directly based on the artificially created community of “Celebration” just outside of Disney World in Orlando, Florida. It provides the movie with its primary degree of narrative conflict, as the Addams’ subversive nature is in direct conflict with the town’s Barbie-influenced overlord Margaux Needler (Alison Janney). The self-centered Needler wants to rid her creepy (in a bad way) little manufactured town of the Addams and their grotesque (in a good way) mansion to greedily promote her dreadful (not in a good way) community.
Alison Janney does gives Needler a suitably self-promoting, monstrous personality and is so superficially self-centered that one character amusingly refers to her as “the plastic lady”. However, this conflict never digs much deeper than suggesting we’re all freaks in some way or another, and the simplified way its message of being true to yourself is presented isn’t particularly original or inspired.
Instead the filmmakers mostly try to coast by on Addams’ familiar style without bringing anything particularly imaginative or new to the proceedings. Considering what a wholly original and distinctive artist Charles Addams was in his lifetime, this animated movie proves to be even more of a disappointment in comparison.
In retrospect, it fires the imagination for what could have been. Originally, when the rights to “The Addams Family” were acquired by Universal Pictures back in 2010, they had a feature length animated movie planned with Tim Burton himself slated to direct. The immensely talented director had planned on using stop-motion animation techniques like we’ve seen in “Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride” (2005) and the Henry Selick-directed “A Nightmare Before Christmas” (1993) to bring these vivid characters to life. That is, before the project was unfortunately cancelled.
Now that’s the movie I wish I had seen.
Rated PG.