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A snatch of Fleischer animation facilitates the transposition, and there's the outsider in town to point up the remake of McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Popeye the sailor (Robin Williams), bulging forearms and squinting eye and corncob pipe, washing up in Sweethaven and promptly running into Kafka's tax collector, he takes it all in stride, "a sensk of humiligration." An unseen Commodore has the run of the place, his Goliath is named Bluto (Paul L. Smith) and engaged to the fussing beanpole, Olive Oyl (Shelley Duvall). On the wharf, at the "house of ill repukes," in the boxing ring, the existential yearning amid mutterings. "What am I? Some sort of barnacle on the dinghy of life?" The strangest of Disney productions is just another dazzling Robert Altman experiment, enchantingly dissonant to heighten the gap between the ink on the comic-strip page and the flesh on the screen. The speech bubbles are filled by Jules Feiffer, the panels are wide enough to take in the seaside burg as a rusting toy village. (Fellini figures in the formal approach, and there's Giuseppe Rotunno handling the camera.) The great American schism ("Sail with me / Stay with me"), the Freudian ordeals of the hero who stumbles upon Swee'pea the psychic orfink (Wesley Ivan Hurt) before locating his own old man, Poopdeck Pappy (Ray Walston). Altman's Une femme est une femme, his Die Dreigroschenoper even, complete with Weill tunes by Harry Nilsson. ("And if it turns out real / Love can turn the wheel," warbles Duvall the Pierrette, magical beyond all description.) Duel at Scab Island, the sunken treasure of a lost son's bronzed shoes, a mouthful of spinach to vanquish the glowering octopus. "Burgers can't be choosers," says Wimpy (Paul Dooley), the proper appreciation falls to Anderson in Punch-Drunk Love. With Richard Libertini, Donald Moffat, MacIntyre Dixon, Roberta Maxwell, Donovan Scott, Allan Nicholls, Bill Irwin, and Linda Hunt.
--- Fernando F. Croce |