Speed Racer
Directed by The Wachowski Brothers
Cross Naomi Klein with Willy Wonka and you get Speed Racer, an Everlasting Gobstopper of a movie that probably cost $150 million, will be advertised ad nauseam, is already trying to seduce very young children into attending by putting toy cars in sugary cereal boxes, and still tries to give you a big, long, boring lecture about evil big-spending conspiratorial corporations.
Yet I have to say there are stretches of Speed Racer that are absolutely adorable–a riot of color, exuberant and merry and cheerful, and so brilliantly paced and cut that it makes you want to stand up and applaud the film editors. This is what Tim Burton’s version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (the really disappointing one with Johnny Depp) should have looked like.
If I were eight years old, I would think Speed Racer was the greatest work of entertainment in the history of the planet, and that includes “Captain Underpants.” I’m not eight, and neither are you, and unfortunately for us the pleasures to be had at Speed Racer in no way equal the adult sophistication that is the quiet hallmark of the Pixar pictures. But a movie this lively deserves a little credit.
Speed Racer is set in an alternate universe in which Americans still live in 1950s-style houses near cities that look like a combination of Blade Runner‘s Los Angeles and the metropolis where the Jedi live in the later Star Wars pictures. They drive cars that go 400 miles an hour and jump and fly and spin and bounce into and off each other as though they were Hot Wheels on a plastic track. But Mom, played by Susan Sarandon who is pushing 60 but looks 40, still makes the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and wears cocktail dresses around the house during the daytime, like Donna Reed in her sitcom.
The plot is both too simple–will our eponymous hero win the big race?–and too complicated. It has something to do with backdoor deals among three huge corporations to control the outcome of various car races. There isn’t an eight-year-old on earth, let alone a 48-year-old, who is going to be able to follow the way in which an auto rally is used to facilitate a merger at a favorable stock price. Fortunately, when the chief villain, played by the absolutely wonderful Roger Allam, delivers his lengthy monologue about the real workings of the racing business, he does so seemingly in a single breath, which gets it over with quickly.
I wish I could say the same for the sentimental monologues. Astonishingly, Speed Racer features five separate speeches–two of them by Susan Sarandon–in which the title character is told how proud people are of him, and how he needs to trust his feelings, and how family is the most important thing, and how they love him. Every one of these speeches is followed by a hug. The schmaltz is laid on so thick it’s not entirely apparent whether it is intended seriously or whether the filmmakers are attempting a very lame parody of tender television-show moments.
It is impossible to know, because the writer-directors are the Wachowski brothers, makers of The Matrix and its sequels. They are recluses who will not be interviewed, one of whom lives as a submissive in a relationship with a dominatrix in San Francisco. One thing is for certain: They have terrible taste in television. Speed Racer is based on an exceptionally bad and weird Japanese cartoon show of the 1960s–a show so bad and weird even I wouldn’t watch it as a kid, and I watched anything, including every episode of My Mother the Car (1965) starring Jerry van Dyke. The original Speed Racer mostly consisted of a static illustration of a boy inside a race car, and you would watch as the drawing was pulled across the screen as though it were animated. Only it wasn’t.
Speed Racer was memorable not because it was good but because it was so awful. It was the animated version of the Japanese cars and television sets that flooded the United States in the years before Japanese manu-facturers began to develop a decent reputation–knockoff junk that looked as cheap as its price tag. It is perverse, to say the least, to use it as source material for a major motion picture–but then, we are talking about a movie made by a dominatrix’s submissive.
God only knows what the Wachowskis would do with My Mother the Car.
John Podhoretz, editorial director of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
