Super Superheroes!
WOW. THAT THREE-LETTER word sums up The Incredibles, and you can be sure that no matter what other superlatives you hear applied to Pixar's latest, the movie will match or exceed them. This superhero romp from writer-director Brad Bird (The Iron Giant) and Pixar's army is no mere cartoon crowd pleaser or merchandising machine, though it surely qualifies as both. It is also, in no particular order, a relentlessly inventive adventure, a slapstick ballet, a thoughtful exploration of blood ties, moral imperatives and America's mythic self-image and an example of linear narrative filmmaking at its technological and esthetic peak. The film's sheer beauty actually moved me to tears-a reaction I've only experienced at three other films this year: Hero, The Passion of the Christ and Osama.
The Incredibles unfolds in a shiny retro futureworld whose Eisenhower-through-Carter architecture and décor references everything from James Bond and Kubrick's 2001 through The Empire Strikes Back and Disney's Epcot Center. The title characters are a family of superheroes forced to enter a relocation program and live the rest of their lives as "normal"-i.e., boring-suburbanites. They are not alone in their coerced anonymity; their non-super countrymen have decided that heroes are just too much trouble. This national overreaction was touched off by Incredibles patriarch Mr. Incredible, a.k.a. Bob Parr (voiced by Craig T. Nelson), whose day-long rampage of do-goodery included the rescue of a suicide jumper who didn't want to be rescued. ("You didn't save my life," the man whines during a press conference, "You ruined my death!") The jumper's subsequent lawsuit against Parr revolutionized tort law and ultimately rendered superheroes uninsurable.
Symbolically enough, this calamity coincided with Bob's marriage to rubber-limbed sweetheart, Elastigirl, a.k.a. Helen (Holly Hunter). This trope links The Incredibles to the rest of Pixar's filmography, which tests the bonds between parents and children (real or surrogate) and concludes that while obligation shackles the heart, it frees the soul. The bulk of the film's wall-to-wall action occurs years after the fall of the costumed gods. Bob has less hair and more gut, plus a job at a vast fluorescent-lit insurance agency whose bland rigidity mirrors the larger world's fear of exceptional people. Against company policy, our beaten-down hero secretly tells customers how to navigate the company's internal labyrinth and get the money they deserve. ("They're penetrating our bureaucracy!" Bob's boss shrieks.)
Helen stays home and raises the Parrs' two secretly super kids. Fashionably bored teenager Violet (Sarah Vowell) is a social misfit with a Cousin It hairstyle and the very useful power of invisibility. Elementary-schooler Dash (Spencer Fox) is a hyperactive troublemaker. Bob and Helen have forbidden him to try out for sports because his super-speed would expose the family's true nature-"The world just wants us to fit in," Helen says-so Dash channels his thwarted energy into pranks. (He can lay a thumbtack on a teacher's chair so fast that not even a Jim Garrison-like deconstruction of a surveillance tape can prove his guilt.)
Bird's wise script sets Bob and Helen on a journey that finds a new bad guy, Syndrome (Jason Lee)-a diabolical imp with troll-doll hair-contriving to get Mr. Incredible back into the hero business. Syndrome's long-legged, husky-voiced henchwoman, Mirage (Elizabeth Peña), tails Bob during his "bowling nights" with his best pal, ice-master Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), which are really just excuses for the two icon-eunuchs to monitor a police scanner for local crises they can solve on the sly. (A slow zoom that pulls back from Mr. Incredible and Frozone to reveal Mirage spying on them across the street is very French Connection.)
Mirage lures Bob to a James Bond-style super-hideout on a volcanic island, where he tests himself against steel-tentacled killer robots and secures employment as sort of a superhero mercenary, which raises the family's living standard even as it convinces Helen her husband is up to no good. She has no clue how right she is; Bob's secret benefactor, Syndrome, was once Bob's sycophantic wannabe sidekick, Incredi-Boy.
Pixar's brand of kid-friendly pop myth is so irresistible that The Incredibles probably could have articulated its dense narrative against the same elaborate Cinemascope backdrops, tossed in some good jokes and action setpieces and called it a day. But Bird and Pixar go much further, creating a comic epic of serious ambition. Its themes include heroism's castration by the nanny state, the subjugation of excellence by "self-esteem" and America's tendency to solve one problem by creating another-and to see itself as the world's ungraceful, unloved, necessary savior. "Don't just stand there, I need you to intervene!" Helen yells at Bob as her children fight beneath the kitchen table.
The Incredibles also touches on the claustrophobic warmth evoked by domesticity (the early scenes in the Incredible home treat suburbia's desolate ambience as soundtrack music, and halo the characters in harsh, realistically molded, downcast lighting) and explores aging parents' fear of lost spontaneity, potency and relevance. Syndrome is a wicked little punk, and an homage to boot-he's drawn to suggest the scrawny female Robin in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns-but as evil as he is, the movie's true villain is time. Bob's gut-first walk and Helen's cottage-cheese thighs aren't just Boomer-pleasing sight gags; they're tender acknowledgements that nobody lives forever, even in comics.
Bird's quicksilver yet geographically comprehensible action scenes-the finest in any current film except Hero-soar into euphoria: action as metaphor, choreography as grammar. But the film's awareness of weakness and fear of death serves as a dramatic undertow, tugging fantasy back to emotional reality. The Incredibles is the first Pixar film in which scores of people are eliminated-Bird's quick-cut, chain-reaction violence suggests a thorough study of Spielberg, Hitchcock and Buster Keaton-but while the mayhem is largely figurative, it is not weightless. Death's sting is brief, but you still feel it-and fear it. "They won't exercise restraint because you're children," Helen warns her kids. "They will kill you if they get the chance."
There are few more moving sights in animation's history than Mr. Incredible in the clutches of Syndrome, hung from an energy rack-torture cage by his ankles and wrists: a pitiful, helpless giant. "You're weak," Syndrome taunts him, "and I've outgrown you."
But Bird balances darkness with light. Few American films, cartoon or live action, are sophisticated enough to define heroism simultaneously as miracle and curse, back it up with resonant images, then insist, persuasively, that good is still worth doing. "When the time comes, you'll know what to do," Helen tells her kids. "It's in your blood."