Movie Review - 'Micmacs'

Micmacs Starring Dany Boon and André Dussollier Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet Rated R

With its instantly recognizable Paris, a mid-century album come to life with faded photos and well-worn newspaper clippings, Micmacs could only be a film by Jean- Pierre Jeunet. The director of A Very Long Engagement and more importantly for these purposes, Amélie, Jeunet’s Paris may not actually exist anywhere but our minds; funny, though, that so many would see it this way. It is, however, the perfect backdrop for his films, particularly the more whimsical city of lights he has fashioned here and in Amélie. The denizens of this Paris are not quite normal. It’s as if we view them through a magnifying glass bent like a fun house mirror, so their peculiarities are a little more peculiar and their styles a little less stylish, a bit louder and more garish. Jeunet clearly pines for a more bohemian Paris, the romanticized model tourists want to see. And perhaps that’s why, even though Micmacs never fully adds up, we don’t completely mind the journey. Like Amélie, Micmacs begins with a once upon a time introduction, adding to the storybook feel of Jeunet’s creation. Opening with a botched disarmament of a land mine in some far off desert and bleeding into how a video store clerk name Bazil (Dany Boon) came to accidentally have a bullet lodged centimeters from his brain for the rest of his life, Jeunet successfully makes a comic case against weapons manufacturing and arms dealing. The clerk is moments from death, but doctors decide – after already making the incision across the side of his head to extract the bullet – to leave it right where it is, because surgery might make the patient a vegetable. So now, a bullet in his head and unemployed after the video store was forced to replace him, Bazil wants revenge. In typical Jean-Pierre Jeunet fashion, that moment of clarity crescendos with an actual crescendo: An orchestra is seated behind him when Bazil happens upon the headquarters of the company that manufactured the bullet that now lives in his skull, a bullet never intended for him in the first place. He decides to bring the weapons manufacturer to its knees. That is, obviously, easier said than done, so Bazil finds help in the form of a ragtag underground Superfriends. None of them have particularly welcome attributes, save the contortionist, but for a man with lead in his head wanting to destroy a multinational merchant of war by any nonviolent means necessary, they’re perfect. There’s a human cannonball, a blind tinkerer who makes robots out of scrap metal, a wordsmith…you get the picture. This is hardly The Magnificent Seven. If it helps complete the picture, though, think of these specialists as the type of wannabe grifters Danny Ocean and his well- tailored gang would have made fun of in con man school. This is, after all, little more than a heist movie, with the ultimate goal being the comeuppance of not one but two weapons manufacturers, who we learn are tied together through sneaky deals that benefit nobody on the planet outside of the two CEOs. The best way to take them down, it’s decided, is to take them down together. To a degree, all heist capers are a little more convoluted than they have to be. If not, the films would only be about 45 minutes long. That’s why there are always escape artists and men with a talent for explosives and usually very pretty distractions; it simply wouldn’t be much fun to watch five or six guys walk into a bank with pointed guns and walk out with the money. Jeunet, however, is living in his own little fantasy world, that Paris that never really existed, so Micmacs adds layer upon layer to the con job. It’s amusing, by and large, if not very involving. The execution of the scam works like a Rube Goldberg device: It’s far more complex than the task at hand and at times you wonder how parts of it even work individually, much less together. For example, within 15 minutes of deciding he wants to cripple the war profiteer, Bazil is just feet away from the snorting, evil CEO (André Dussollier, seen a couple years ago in the taut French thriller Tell No One). But merely confronting him in his office or at home is not the kind of dish best served cold Bazil has in mind. Instead, Micmacs devolves into a Keystone Cops farce for a protracted amount of time, and the film becomes less about this picturesque Paris or even the oddball characters populating it and more about how effective a puppet master Jean-Pierre Jeunet can be. There’s a difference between watching a great film that bears the mark of an artist and watching a director make a film, where his godlike presence is not only unmistakable but also overshadows the events that unfold on his watch. Jeunet’s Amélie is a great film that almost comes together too seamlessly, and even though it clearly has a distinct style, it is not the trickery we notice because everything involved serves the story so well. There’s less of a story in Micmacs – again, there could be a resolution within 30 minutes if Jeunet wanted to act upon it – but he forces himself to make a two-hour film and load it down with far too many elements that exist simply to extend the story, rather than spring to life from it.