In "The Simpsons Movie," no good deed goes uncrushed.
This merry celebration of mayhem, hostility, carnage, wanton destruction, power lust, dysfunction, nihilism and the proper application of gigantic plastic domes to American cities will certainly satisfy those who've seen all 400-odd episodes of the TV show twice, as well as those who've only glimpsed "The Simpsons" during a transmigration to more sports programming.
Homer, the dad from hell with Nixon's blue jowls, Fred Mertz's cue-ball skull and a monkey's eyes, has acquired a pig, and like all dads from hell, he loves the pig more than his family.
The problem with the pig is that what goes in must come out, alchemized by pig amino acids into a foul putrescence that's about the density of depleted uranium. What to do with this stuff? Homer packs it up and takes it to Springfield's lake. Avoiding a slalom course of "NO DUMPING" signs, Homer gets his GTO close enough to the lake to dump the vile load. Instant eco-catastrophe. The government, led by EPA eco-Genghis Russ Cargill (the voice of Albert Brooks), immediately fools President Schwarzenegger into authorizing the doming of Springfield. The town's citizens are imprisoned in three-foot-thick translucence. They quickly track the source of the sacrilege to Homer and, being normal, empathetic, forgiving Americans, decide to lynch him. He and his family somehow manage to escape to Alaska.
Meanwhile, the EPA decides to tactical-nuke Springfield and build a new and better Grand Canyon in the crater -- Tom Hanks is spokesman for the new Grand Canyon -- and the Simpsons, minus Homer, head back to help. Finally, Homer sees the light and heads back, too.
The Simpsons comic aesthetic might be described as nightmare surrealism punctuated by violence and slapstick projected on characters of cartoon simplicity, held together by an internal logic whose flimsiness is part of the joke. The upshot is like a cross between the early mayhem of the Bugs Bunny cartoons and dialogue by Edward Albee. The genius is in the writing and in keeping all gambits created by the individual writers in sync, so the piece has a tonal consistency and a narrative flow. A lost art in Hollywood? It's really one of the best movies of the year.
-- Stephen Hunter (July 27, 2007)
Contains adult material.
