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80.04: Chop-sockey Jules Verne

From: Brian Taves <btav~at~loc.gov>
Date: Tue, 29 Jun 2004 19:08:51 -0400 (EDT)
To: jvforum <jvf~at~math.technion.ac.il>

    Although Passepartout has usually played the role of loyal helpmate,
in the 2004 version of Le Tour du monde en quatre-vingts jours the
sidekick kicks his way into the spotlight. Reconceived as a star vehicle
for Jackie Chan, the story is completely revised around his persona.
Perhaps Chan saw Cantinflas in the 1956 film and imagined he could
undertake a similar performance, but neglected to note that in that case
the whole movie was not built around Cantinflas. By contrast, Chan's
insertion into the role of Passepartout leads to what is ostensibly a
subplot coming to dominate---the race around the world is subservient,
just as it is his character's secondary motive. Whereas in 1956,
Cantinflas simply played a Frenchman as Latin, in 2004 Chan's accent and
appearance are explained as the result of a French father and Chinese
mother.

    The wholesale changes were regarded as updates and improvements--and
simultaneously closer to Verne. Director Frank Coraci told SCI FI Wire
that he wanted to change the main character to make him more accessible to
today's audiences. "When I read the [Jules Verne] book and then [saw] the
[1956] movie, Phileas Fogg was a very secure, confident person, and he was
a wealthy man who made a bet," Coraci said. "He traveled the world, and he
didn't really change enough for me to make the story worth telling for
now. So I thought, 'Let's make Phileas Fogg more in the spirit of Jules
Verne. Let's make him a dreamer.' He can see the future, and that's what
Jules Verne was. He was amazing." Coraci said that he had only fleeting
memories of the original film before he went back to research the material
for his update. "I went to the book first and re-read it, since I read it
as a kid, and I remembered some of the scenes. Then I went to the
original movie, where I remembered the balloon only and the bullfight
scene." Coraci's impression of the film was that it fit the time in which
it was made, but it was no longer relevant to modern audiences. "From the
perspective then, people went to the movies and were amazed to see a
widescreen movie."

    The 2004 version was made on a $110 million budget, the largest ever
for an independently made production (Seattle Post Intelligencer,
6/17/2004), shooting in Thailand and Germany's Babelsberg studios, with
pick-ups in Hong Kong, China, France, and Austria. It was bought in
November of 2003 by Walt Disney to be one of the company's key family
releases for Summer 2004.

    The plot moves the temporal setting forward to the end of the last
century, and from the opening shot Verne is inverted: the hero is the
robber of the bank of England, and masquerades as Passepartout. He
accepts the dangerous job of Fogg's valet and object of Fogg's experiments
in order to hide from the police.

    Like the 1972 Australian animated version where Fogg's motive is to
marry Belinda Maze, in 2004 he has an entirely new reason for the trip.
In 2004, the wager comes about from Fogg's calculation at the Royal
Academy of Science as to how long it would take the thief to get to China.
He must either win and become Minister of Science, or lose and cease
inventing.

    The producers somehow had the impression that Fogg was in the
ex/import business, hence saw changing him into an inventor as original
(Starlog #324, p. 52). Despite Fogg's obvious eccentricity as a
scientist, the audience is keyed to his true status since he operates
outside of the established Royal Academy of Sciences with its aged,
corrupt members, who deride Fogg for believing in evolution and dinosaurs.

    The serious sides of Fogg become awkward, mordant intrusions rather
than insights into his character. He explains that he has no family while
sitting in a tub with Passepartout in a scene that, like his later mention
of learning to wear women's clothes, adds a disconcerting dimension to his
sexuality. Steve Coogan said of his role as Fogg, "David Niven's
rendition of the character is very close to the way it's written in the
book. He's kind of passive, inscrutable, undemonstrative about emotion
and utterly confident of his ability to win this bet. Even though [Niven]
did it very well in the original one, that doesn't appeal as a
performance. I like the idea to have somebody who on the outside is very
confident, on the inside is slightly vulnerable and nervous about his
ability. Most people have those kind of insecurities, so it gives you more
opportunity for comedy, because it's always funny when someone's trying to
appear one way, but inside they're feeling something different."
However, Coogan's interpretation ultimately adds up to little more than a
man who is socially inept and unsophisticated--unable to discern the
obvious subterfuge of Passepartout--as awkward in his dealings with other
people as he is in producing workable scientific results. While these
aspects of Fogg in the book and in the 1956 and 1989 screen versions are
understated, here they are foregrounded in his fussy, confused mannerisms.

    The skulduggery is shifted from an errant, obsessed police detective
to a member of the aristocracy who uses the Royal Academy of Science to
impede progress. Fix (in a manic performance by Ewen Bremner) finally
redeems himself, by exposing the Academy's Lord Kelvin (a flamboyant Jim
Broadbent) as the true villain. Fix becomes a very minor character who
appears sporadically and is even more wholly incompetent than his literary
predecessor.

    Kelvin also uses his position to sell arms to Chinese warlords. Some
politically sensitive critics with an excessively watchful eye for
correctness decried the film for casting Chan as ostensibly Fogg's
servant, labeling it racist for that reason, when instead Fogg has been
made imbecilic and Passepartout the hero. The racism instead comes in
through the use of Chan's martial arts stunt teams. Chan, also the
executive producer, invokes all the most hoary stereotypes of Asian
villainy to justify his caracterization. His adversaries are led by a
prototype dragon lady (Karen Joy Morris aka Karen Mok) with metal-covered
nails. These Limehouse imaginings, whicht could well have sprung from the
xenophobia of Sax Rohmer, were cliches nearly a century ago, but are
invoked shamelessly to justify Chan's casting.

    Adding Chan also tilted the traditional ethnic make-up of the book;
with one of the three central characters already Asian, and Asian themes
added, the character of Aouda was altered. Moreover, the producers wanted
to introduce the love interest at an earlier point than Fogg's arrival in
India, so added her at the first stop: France. Instead of colonial
opposites attracting, here it is the traditional British and French
enemies. Fogg inexplicably falls in love with Monique (Cecile de France)
at a gallery as a result of her truly dismal painting of man in flight,
while in the background Passepartout is again involved in a martial arts
battle against his Chinese adversaries.

    The introduction of a balloon only seems present as a cursory homage
to the 1956 version. Passepartout is dragged through Paris hanging from
the balloon in antics sometimes reminiscent of Joe in Cinq semaines en
ballon. Fogg is initially annoyed by Monique's determination to continue
on the trip. She catches on to Passepartout's real purpose, and both the
two make a covert mutual pact to help Fogg.

    A hokey stop in Turkey replaces the equally unnecessary pause in Spain
from the 1956 film. That diversion at least enabled cameos by Luis
Dominquin, Gilbert Roland, and Cesar Romero, and Jose Greco. In 2004 we
are given Arnold Schwarznegger as a much-married Turkish prince who lusts
for Monique. He wears a long wig–yet whose statue has him in short
hair!

    Back at the Academy, Lord Salisbury suggests Fogg is aware of
Passepartout's theft. Even India offers no local atmosphere; it is
instead a prelude to the conflict in China, with Fogg, Passepartout, and
Monique again ambushed. Even such obvious pleasures as linking an escape
to a passing elephant are overlooked in staging routine fights on cramped
sets.

    The 1989 miniseries was the first version to add a trip to mainland
China (although the 1963 sequel THE THREE STOOGES GO AROUND THE WORLD IN A
DAZE took Fogg's grandson through the communist bureaucracies of Red
China). In his homeland, Passepartout, revealed as Lau
Xing, introduces his idyllic little village as he returns the idol stolen
from the Bank in England and carried halfway 'round the world. But the
town and resulting battle are on such a small scale, compared to the
global pursuit of the warlords, as to be nonsensical. With Lau Xing's
triumph here, the movie comes to its logical end. That it continues is
almost an afterthought, having so thoroughly supplanted
Verne's plot in importance.

    The book's episode of Passepartout becoming lost in Yokohama and
finding employment in a circus, where he is located by Fogg, is replaced
to Fogg's detriment. Having angrily left his companions behind, Fogg is
quickly robbed in San Francisco and found as a homeless beggar by Lau Xing
and Monique. The movie never explains how the remainder of the trip is
financed; a scene in which Lau was to fight John L. Sullivan for their
fare was cut (as were, probably, other scenes in a choppy and disconnected
narrative that at 125 minutes is already too long).

    Symbolizing the fact that the revisions have removed all the tension
from the novel's journey is the substitution of the transcontinental
railroad with a stagecoach trip, nonsensical given the time and necessity
for speed. Similarly, instead of the self-consuming Henrietta, the SS
Carmen is used as a base to create, in six hours, a flying machine
catapulted into the air solely powered by Passepartout's pedaling to
travel the final leg of the trip. With its swept-wing design, the craft
is no more credible than the remainder of the narrative. A crash landing
manages to end the flight at the Academy, where among those waiting to
applaud Fogg is Queen Victoria (Kathy Bates)--a character who had also
seen crackpot science in the 1967 Verne film THOSE FANTASTIC FLYING
FOOLS/BLAST-OFF!/JULES VERNE'S ROCKET TO THE MOON.

    An insipid final credits song segues to the tiresome "It's a Small
World," which might more accurately have been the film's title, given the
changes from Verne. Ironically, the filmmakers will probably blame the
movie's dismal box-office failure on the fact that they did not depart yet
further from the book, given their confident assertions of improving upon
it. The movie debuted in 9th place despite a mid-week opening and that by
the second week had already begun to disappear from theaters. This ought
to make producers wonder if they should not have instead invested in a
theatrical restoration of the 70 mm. version of the 1956 version, rather
than simply releasing it simultaneously on DVD with the new version.

    While criticizing a film purely on the basis of fidelity to its source
is not entirely fair, it is reasonable to compare it to other versions.
For instance, the 2004 version's score by Trevor Jones is entirely too
evocative of John Williams's JURASSIC PARK theme, and demonstrates the
unmatchable achievement of Victor Young in 1956 and how much it
contributed to that movie.

    Although emphasizing humor more than any previous version, the
level is epitomized by a fight in the Statue of Liberty under construction
in which one man's legs slide thru the nostrils of the Statue's head.
The new plot might have suited an animated version (perhaps in Chan's
cartoon series JACKIE CHAN ADVENTURES?), but here, weak as the script is
(by David Titcher, David Benullo, and David Goldstein), the unimaginative
direction of Coraci is far worse. Scarcely a joke is not not muffed or an
opportunity for wit not missed.

    Recalling Saul Bass's end credits sequence in 1956, the only
commendable innovation in 2004 are animated transitions between locales
that try to replace absent connective scenes and give some pace to an
otherwise leaden experience. For despite the travel, the only sense of
movement comes in Chan's fights, yet even they are oddly listless and
unmotivated. Perhaps fortunately a fight between Chan and a giant squid
was dropped, probably as too expensive.

    Whereas the 1989 version effectively recaptured the 1956 idea of
cameos, in 2004 they are sometimes so obscure as to be unrecognizable (Rob
Schneider as a Frisco bum), are wasted and unnecessary (John Cleese as a
bobby), or quite simply weird (Owen and Luke Wilson appearing as the
Wright Brothers in the western American desert). As the New York Times
noted in its incomprehensibly favorable review of June 16, the movie "lets
all its seams show. Don't ask how the travelers get out of one scrape and
proceed to the next." A complete lack of internal consistency or respect
for its audience makes the film even weaker than the sum of its parts, a
movie that, after viewing, is recognized as worse than when it was
unspooling. William Arnold, critic for the Seattle Post Intelligencer,
best summed it up in his review of 6/17/2004. "We seem to have entered a
brave new millennium of filmmaking in which our entire collective
cinematic past is being remade and reinterpreted as moronic farce ... [in
this case] it's been turned into a stupid kung fu movie."



Brian Taves
email: <btav~at~loc.gov>


Disclaimer--All opinions expressed are my own.
Received on Wed 30 Jun 2004 - 02:19:39 IDT

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