Flak Magazine: Review of Monkeybone, 3-6-01

Monkeybone is, more than anything else, a terrible idea in a Hollywood climate where the bottom line is the bottom line — the movie didn't even open in the Top 10, a major embarrassment to a studio. (In fact, Monkeybone is a Fox project from the reign of Bill Mechanic, whose firing is said to have resulted in large part from how the similarly costly and non-Rupert-Murdoch-friendly Fight Club underperformed.) Major financial backing is required for the accomplished blend of live action and stop-motion animation Monkeybone features, and throughout the history of the film industry, such pursestrings may as well be nooses for projects without comfortable demographic slots.

Which is why it's a terrible idea: It doesn't have an audience. This kind of movie can't survive the compromises required to get a PG-13, but it could never dream of recouping its costs if the 16-and-under crowd were prevented from seeing it. At the same time, though its humor is lowbrow to the max, it's all wrong for the kid market. Not many grown-ups will appreciate its social and aesthetic consciousness, and many of those that do are likely either to be disinterested by its slip-shod narrative or put off by, oh, the farting monkey dolls with suppository thumbs. It's a mess; indeed, to appreciate Monkeybone is to see what it could have been and pity it.

Because it could have been great. Monkeybone director Henry Selick also gave us the rightfully beloved The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach, movies with undeniable dark sides that are leavened by their storybook whimsy. With Monkeybone, an adaptation of Kaja Blackley's graphic novel "Dark Town," Selick lets the whimsy eat itself, kicking open wickedly satirical doors about the bourgeosie and the debased state of commercial art — the same old broad barns you've seen hit before, but Monkeybone hits them with delectable enthusiasm.

Having suffered from sleep deprivation, Stu Miley (Brendan Fraser) hooked up with his therapist, Julie (Bridget Fonda), who weaned him off sleepless nights and Kafkaesque nightmare art and onto well-restedness and respectable cartooning. The resulting creation, the simian Monkeybone, is shown as nothing less than the awkward manifestation of Stu's sex drive — the movie opens on the pilot of the animated "Monkeybone" sitcom in which the unexpected arousal of Stu's pubescent proxy causes Monkeybone to be literally unleashed from his groin. It'll surprise no one to find out that Stu is mild-mannered to the extreme, that he exorcises his demons through creating the mischievous Monkeybone. Oh, and he's an Artist, too; the idea of merchandising Monkeybone greatly turns him off.

Everything goes awry when a car accident (caused, as it were, by Monkeybone) sends Stu into a coma and he descends into Down Town, a dreamland governed by Hypnos (Giancarlo Esposito). This is where not only the comatose live, but their dreams as well, and it's home to Monkeybone (voiced by John Turturro) and a host of other freaks. Stu and Monkeybone plot to acquire a coveted Exit Pass, but Stu is undermined when the sick-of-being-repressed Monkeybone dupes him and uses the escape route to inhabit Stu's body. It turns out it's all been a scheme; Edgar Allen Poe, Lizzie Borden, Stephen King — they're all in Down Town, trapped by Hypnos while their unadulterated ids replaced them in order to do whatever needed to be done to generate the hottest commodity in Down Town: nightmares.

Cool premise: Monkeybone has been unleashed into Stu's body in order to wield the power of art to terrify, forcing both the characters and audience to reckon with the role of fright and horror in art and the repression of the outré parts of our nature. Cop-out premise: Julie has developed nightmare juice in her sleep lab and Monkeybone is using Stu's prestige to disseminate this chemical via that much-loathed merchandising. (This is where the farting comes in.)

Monkeybone takes the latter route, culminating with Stu pleading with Death (Whoopi Goldberg) to let him go to Earth and convince Julie of his love. Death permits it, but sticks Stu in the body of an Olympic gymnast (Chris Kattan) who just died of a broken neck and from whom doctors are harvesting organs. With the slit in his belly duct-taped shut and his head attached to a T-square placed down his spine, Stu not only wins Julie but discovers Monkeybone's scheme, and in order to stop this deadly neurotoxin from being released, Stu and Monkeybone go head-to-head in a fight held almost entirely on the rigging of a big Monkeybone balloon.

A split-personality hero vs. an unrestrained id? Neurotoxic gas? Last-act set-piece involving big balloons? Beter not tell Batman screenwriter Sam Hamm … oh, wait. He wrote this, too.

That only underscores the connection both Selick and Hamm have to Batman director Tim Burton; Selick may have directed A Nightmare Before Christmas, but it's Burton whose name is in the title. Selick fills Monkeybone with all sorts of harangues against high society and its denizens — the toy and fast food wonks slavering to synergize with Monkeybone, the museum-fundraiser types who swoon over the crude monkey, the doctors hounding the miraculously-revived gymnast for his organs. It's Burton's genius to be able to synthesize those kinds of discordant elements with both compelling narrative and his romantic sensibilities. Monkeybone falls far from that, and also fails to achieve the brilliantly ramshackle approach of a Terry Gilliam. It's stuck in-between, too, almost as badly as Stu.

Also like Stu, the movie gets its hands on an Exit Pass: Brendan Fraser. Selick's eye and Hamm's often-sharp script take the movie far, but Fraser seals the deal as tightly as it's going to be sealed. He gets the doofus roles, but he immerses himself in them, and he's got charm and grace and wit to spare. His takes on Stu and Monkeybone are both internalized and expansive, heavily reliant on his ability to fill the frame with easy charisma. And when he faces off against Kattan, the laughs come as heartily as they have in many months.

Monkeybone is almost self-hating: Stu loathes the merchandising, and the pivotal role Monkeybone dolls play is perhaps its lamest idea. It shocks us with how it subverts expectation (Rose McGowan's last scene is a doozy) but doesn't weave that subversion into anything more than discontent. Climactically, Stu and Monkeybone are reintegrated, but you don't really have a sense of why their schism is a bad thing. They just make a mess when they're apart, and Exhibit A is Monkeybone.

— Sean Weitner (sean@flakmag.com)