From a Great and Detached Distance

THE WEEPING MEADOW

Directed by Theo Angelopoulos

TIM BURTON'S CORPSE BRIDE

Directed by Mike Johnson and Tim Burton

Movies don't have to get physically close to their characters to draw you into their world; they can achieve a different kind of intimacy by standing back and reminding us of how small we are. Theo Angelopoulos' The Weeping Meadow demonstrates this principle. The first installment in a projected trilogy summing up the 20th Century, it's an epic film of a type that's rarely attempted.

Like Barry Lyndon -and Homer, whom the script and imagery invoke-it prefers physical distance to closeness, and repeatedly places its main characters, the members of a refugee family, in the larger context of geography and history, following them through poverty, the rise and fall of fascism, and a horrendous series of disasters. It's probably the largest production of Angelopoulos' career, but the movie's relentless formal precision-it's composed mainly in medium and long shots, with long takes whenever possible-makes you think not about production values, but about the fragility of individuals caught up in the gears of history. It finds a cool-headed but empathetic visual analogy for the way we tend to envision history: as anecdotes about masses of unknown people moving from place to place, enduring unimaginable suffering, then shaking off the pain, reinventing themselves and moving on.

The main characters-orphaned refugee Eleni, or Helen (Alexandra Aidini), her adoptive brother and future husband Alexis (Nikos Poursadinis) and their children-at first seem as tiny and contrived as figurines in a diorama, and Angelopoulos enforces that notion by composing virtually the entire movie as a series of immense tableaus. The family's house is swallowed by flood water and stays submerged for what feels like an eternity; the drowning house is often framed in extreme longshot, putting it in the context of other houses we never visit; meanwhile, rowboats drift through the frame. The abduction and torture of average citizens at the hands of fascist goons is conveyed in a meticulous, slow crane shot that looks down on police herding prisoners into unseen rooms on a dimly lit street. (It's like the way Roman Polanski filmed the ghetto rebellion in The Pianist, peering down from the hero's apartment window across the street.) A labor activist dies in a field of white sheets drying on laundry lines.

Adapt to Angelopoulos' stately rhythms-no small thing to ask, given the movie's three hour running time-and you'll be amazed by the movie's power, which builds very slowly as we watch these specks move through time, dancing and feasting and playing music, marrying and raising kids, enlisting in the army, scouring the countryside in search of missing loved ones and plotting a desperate, perhaps pointless escape to America.

The Weeping Meadow reminded me of poet and critic Vachel Lindsay's statement that characterization in movies isn't like characterization in novels or plays. We feel for movie characters as children feel for their dolls-personalizing them by deciding to care, imprinting their featureless surfaces with our feelings and dreams. When they break, it hurts.

If I Had to pick one gag to illustrate Tim Burton's idea of funny, I might go with the moment in the new stop-motion fantasy Corpse Bride when a tiny green worm that talks like Peter Lorre tells an aghast human, "Excuse me, you don't know me, but I used to live in your dead mother."

That's a good bit, and there are a dozen others in Corpse Bride that equal it. Yet I can't hold up the movie as an example of Burton's best. It's not quite funny enough to get by with just being funny, and it lacks the assured mix of whimsy and melancholy that made Burton's last two movies, Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, feel like evolutionary leaps forward.

Co-directed by Burton and Austin animator Mike Johnson, Corpse Bride is a stop-motion fable about a repressed young man named Victor van Dort (Johnny Depp) who accidentally marries an adoring but unfortunately dead woman (Helena Bonham Carter). It plugs into Burton's yucky-silly wit (hanging in the underworld, Victor reunites with his late, beloved dog, who's all bones) but that's about all it plugs into. Scene for scene, it lacks the buoyant madness of Burton's teamwork with animator Henry Selick. There's no musical number as flat-out demented as Oogie Boogie's solos in A Nightmare Before Christmas, and no image as menacingly beautiful as the spectral rhinoceros in James and the Giant Peach. In fact, whenever Corpse Bride threatens to throw off the shackles of children's entertainment and flirt with primal longing, fear and pain-to name just three emotions common to fairytales worth remembering-it pulls back.

The only near-transcendent moment is a scene where Victor and the Corpse Bride play an impromptu piano duet, communicating with music and furtive glances rather than words; but just when it builds to a rush of feeling that might complicate the hero's mixed feelings about leaving his mortal fiance, Victoria (Emily Watson), the filmmakers move on to the next thing. It's as if a pin had accidentally been pulled from a grenade, then hastily replaced.

The Corpse Bride's back-story (she was murdered by a greedy suitor, who shows up at Victor and Victoria's rehearsal dinner looking for a fresh mark) promises a scary, moving subplot about justice from beyond the grave. But Burton and Johnson can't bring themselves to follow through; they duck these volcanic feelings, then muff the resolution so badly that young children may have no idea what happened or what it meant.

This is the safest movie Burton has ever put his name on, and that's cause for concern. What distinguishes Burton's fantasies from those of his most prominent imitators and rivals (think back on Chris Columbus' first two Harry Potter movies, if you haven't purged them from your memory) is their willingness to conjure up sneaky, surprising, often conflicting emotions-to present images and situations that confound easy responses and force you to find your own way, personalizing the movie as it unreels.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a perfect example of this; the sometimes reductive critical response to Depp's performance as Wonka-Is he supposed to be menacing or pitiable? Which eccentric celebrity is he imitating?-isn't proof that the movie is a muddle or a hack job, but an indication that the movie is more emotionally complex than its detractors can see. Charlie's line, "Candy doesn't have to have a point, that's why it's candy" isn't a disclaimer, but a challenge to look beneath the images and scenes and sense their careful arrangement; so is the recurring use of monolith images, which aren't merely 2001 quotes, but symbolic doorways connecting Wonka's emotionally tortuous but creatively fruitful past (his father's rectangular row house) to his future as a businessman and artist (the Wonkavision broadcast).

Corpse Bride has movie quotes galore-including a Vertigo-style, 360 degree swoon, and a Gone with the Wind joke that's funny precisely because it's so obvious-but they aren't digested, transformed and personalized. They just sit there like smiley-face stickers. On the whole, the movie is more sweet and clever than meaningful. It lacks the swing-for-the-fences ambition and unstable emotions that mark Burton as more than an elegant prankster. It's the Tim Burton picture his detractors keep accusing him of making; a Tim Burton movie for people who have a low tolerance for whimsy, sentiment and surreal digressions; the same people who might eat Italian food more often, if it wasn't for the garlic.