A sickly sweet confection

By Mike D'Angelo

Thursday, May 8, 2008 | 3:54 p.m.

Movie adaptations of ancient TV shows generally appeal to folks who bear some degree of nostalgic affection for the original series. But Speed Racer, the Wachowski brothers’ mega-budget, CGI-heavy reimagining of the ’60s anime import, seems likely to connect only with two radically disparate groups: (1) very small children, and (2) avant-garde art fiends. Both will be captivated, at least for a while, by the film’s aggressive subordination of character and narrative to hyperkinetic displays of color, movement, perspective and rhythm. The little ones will also greatly enjoy the antics of a rambunctious pet chimpanzee. Ordinary viewers, however, following an initial eye-popping sugar rush, will quickly experience something akin to battle fatigue. Speed Racer zips past you with such Day-Glo delirium that after a while the details cease to register—you’re aware that images are being hurled pell-mell at your retinas, but all you really perceive is a constant, undifferentiated rush of hyperactive sensation. It’s the visual equivalent of wolfing down cotton candy and orange soda for two hours and change.

I’m not sure whether it’s help or hindrance that the Wachowskis, who also wrote the screenplay, take care to retain Speed Racer’s essential simplicity. If you know the show, you know the drill: Speed Racer (Emile Hirsch)—yes, that’s his first and last name—is a painfully earnest young man, born into a racing family, who loves and lives to drive his beloved Mach 5 automobile really really fast. He’s supported by his mom and pop, literally known as Mom (Susan Sarandon) and Pops (John Goodman), and by his aggressively winsome girlfriend-in-name-only, the asexual Trixie (Christina Ricci, looking more doll than human). Speed’s younger brother, Spritle (Paulie Litt), runs around with the aforementioned chimp getting into crass mischief; Speed’s older brother, allegedly deceased, may or may not in fact be living in secret as his chief roadway rival, the mysteriously masked Racer X (played by an actor whose voice and jaw fans of a current hit TV show will recognize at once, but whose identity constitutes a minor spoiler). The only real question, apart from who’ll win the climactic race (hint: Speed Racer), is whether Speed can maintain his tiresome integrity in the face of Corporate Corruption, represented here by an oily, mercenary tycoon named Royalton (Roger Allam).

Let’s ignore for the moment the hilarious hypocrisy of a tract against synergistic big business that takes the form of a gabillion-dollar Time Warner summer tentpole. I have no doubt that the Wachowskis—who, before they got bogged down in pretentious Matrix sequels, made the comparatively tiny lesbian thriller Bound—are totally sincere in rooting for the little guy. What makes the sentiment ring hollow is less the whiz-bang ostentation of big-budget studio filmmaking than this particular film’s genuinely radical emphasis on form over content. It’s hard to care about foreground objects like people when they’re clearly just excuses for experiments with hues, textures and transitions. All of the Wachowskis’ creative energy here goes into what film academics call the medium’s “plastic” properties. Using the latest in green-screen technology, they’ve assembled a look so hyper-real that no line of dialogue or plot complication can possibly fight its way past the fusillade of vertiginous Crayola imagery into actual consciousness. Further, no individual scene is half so distinctive as the seamless, fluid way that each scene—each shot, practically—blurs into the next, usually via horizontal wipes triggered by the sudden appearance of a character moving from right to left.

If it sounds like I sort of admire this approach, that’s because I do ... in theory. Turns out, though, that there’s a good reason why avant-garde filmmakers tend to make shorts rather than two-hour features: There’s only so much plastic abstraction the human brain can absorb at once. The first 20 minutes or so of Speed Racer are astounding, but once you’ve adjusted to the film’s unique visual sensibility, and marveled at gorgeous computer-enhanced flourishes like the out-of-focus flashbulbs that morph into fuzzy valentine hearts behind Speed and Trixie’s chaste kiss, there’s nothing left to hold your attention, unless you’re really into chimp comedy. (I’m telling you: Bring the kids.) The poor actors, pressed into service as living cartoons, can’t find anything to play—Hirsch, especially, seems very much aware that he’s about as crucial to this enterprise as are the models in a J. Crew catalog. Even the racing sequences ultimately become tiresome, if only because it’s hard to get involved in a physical competition that openly defies the laws of physics. All Speed Racer asks you to do is gape. That just isn’t enough.