The Muppets

In this film, declaratively titled The Muppets, writers Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Get Him to the Greek) try to breathe new life into Jim Henson’s Muppets, who have been floundering in a risk-averse studio limbo since Henson’s death in 1990.  His son and successor Brian and the other directors of later-day Muppet movies placed the characters into pre-existing narratives in films like The Muppet Christmas Carol and The Muppet Treasure Island, and the Muppets have shown up here and there in YouTube videos singing covers of popular songs. All of these recent incarnations prominently featured newer characters performed by younger Muppeteers.  But Segal, Stoller and director James Bobin (of TV’s Da Ali G Show and Flight of the Conchords) get back to basics, with an original story focusing primarily on Kermit the Frog, Ms. Piggy, and Fozzie Bear in an attempt to reintroduce them to modern popular culture while still honoring their legacy.

The filmmakers do a better job than anyone else has at keeping these beloved characters relevant while protecting what makes them special in the first place, and they don't seem overly concerned with furthering the old-fashioned, family-friendly image of the Muppets, which Disney and the Henson company have emphasized in every Muppet project since Henson’s death.  Instead, the filmmakers attempt to remind us that, in their heyday, the Muppets were both cutting-edge and ahead of their time. These ambitions are lofty, and while Segal and Stoller succeed in making a worthy and entertaining movie, they fail to capture any of the real magic of the Henson-produced films and shows. Although the new team has assembled most of the right ingredients for a great Muppet movie, they lack the most important ones: the heart and soul of the Muppet characters, especially Henson’s alter ego Kermit the Frog.

The puppet characters don’t “come to life” in this film because the story is frustratingly underdeveloped.  The original Muppet films had simple but solid narratives, and they managed to be inventively funny within their formulaic 1940s musical structures while also exploring emotional themes in a genuine and even profound way.  The “soul” of the characters came by way of an exquisite balance of humor and emotion that could feel simultaneously silly and profound.  Segel and Stoller only take the surface elements of the Muppets--the characters, the upbeat songs, the superficial "heart"--but they fail to do very much with them, settling instead for conceptual cleverness. As in Brian Singer’s 2006’s Superman Returns, the story catches us up on what happened to the characters during their long disappearance from the popular culture. But, as in Superman Returns, this meta-concept fails to connect to the narrative themes, and the resulting film feels awkwardly self-conscious, rather than confidently self-aware.

The central premise is that the Muppets, who disbanded a long time ago, are in danger of losing the theater where they did their old show, and a new Muppet character named Walter, who grew up idolizing the Muppet stars even though he was raised as a human, sets out to save the day by reuniting them.  It's a good idea, but the writers never explain or explore what broke up the original group. Therefore they provide no emotional depth to this story they way Michael Ardnt was able to do with similarly familiar characters in last year’s Toy Story III. In the hands of more adept screenwriters the issues of how friendship changes over the decades, and how group dynamics affect relationships between co-workers and families could all have been explored through the eyes of the new character. Just a few scenes between Walter and Kermit could have taken this film to a much deeper level.

Even more unforgivable is the lack of a convincing villain. Chris Cooper’s money-grubbing oil tycoon is not as awful as Jeffrey Tambor's bad guy in the previous Muppet film, 1999’s flaccid Muppets From Space, but Cooper is nowhere close to the delightfully sinister antagonists of the first Muppet movies, played by Charles Durning and Charles Grodin. The original songs by Bret McKenzie of the aforementioned Flight of the Conchords are decent and they're a welcome change from past Muppet projects, which have relied far too much on non-original pop songs, but they don’t reach the heights of Paul Williams's or Joe Roposo’s timeless tunes, and some, like Cooper's hip-hop number, are downright cringe-worthy.

However, the filmmakers get credit for finding the correct tone for this movie.  I was worried they might take a page from television shows like 30 Rock, which use lots of quick cuts to gag scenes that illustrate what characters are describing and thinking--a modern comedy technique that allows for more jokes per minute but exhausts itself over the running time of a feature film. I also feared we might see an avalanche of movie and TV parodies, as was the case in an unproduced Muppet script written ten years ago that featured Kermit and Ms. Piggy dressed up like John Travolta and Uma Thurman doing the dance scene from Pulp Fiction.  Thankfully, this movie never succumbs to these temptations. The filmmakers have wisely used all that type material in their promotional clips and trailers, where it is far more affective, and kept the movie a more straightforward story.

Of course, one of the things which made the original Muppet movies and TV shows so ahead of their time was how self-referential and self-deprecating they were, and their creators were never been shy about breaking the fourth wall and reminding us that “it's just a movie.”  This film continues the tradition but with mixed results. Since the screenwriters haven’t done the work to really explore any of the characters' journeys, they don't have the right to undercut their material as much as they do. The celebrity cameos, another Muppet staple, are meaningless here; it feels like the director randomly peppered his scenes with whoever happened to be walking by the set that day. 

On the other hand, many of the choices are spot-on.  Walter and Gary, Segal's character, are biological brothers, and it's an inspired and funny idea.  I especially liked seeing the two of them sharing a room with Burt-and-Ernie-style twin beds well into their adulthood. Making Walter someone who always loved and identified with the old Muppet Show, tells the story from the perspective of someone who is both brand new to us and looking nostalgically back as we are. The “let's get the band back together" plot also manages to be simultaneously forward-moving and backward-looking.  It is reminiscent the epic 1980 comedy The Blues Brothers, and while The Muppets is not as creatively successful a film, it still makes excellent use of this structural choice.

At their best, Jim Henson’s Muppets projects combined the wisecracking slapstick of the Borscht Belt with the magical wonder of children's fantasy. This has proved a difficult tonal blend to maintain over the decades. Ever since Henson’s died and people began tiptoeing around his creations, the humor has felt tired and flat, and the sincerity has been ramped up to the point of saccharin and schmaltz. The Muppets does a decent job of pulling off this balancing act, and while I don't think it is a great film that brings the characters back to life with hope for future development, I do think it's about as good as 1984's The Muppets Take Manhattan, the last official Muppet film produced by Henson himself. This is a small movie, despite its huge marketing campaign, and it feels more like a nostalgic reunion than the second coming of a great movie franchise.  Nevertheless, it does feel like it belongs in the canon of the other Muppet films, and in this respect it's far superior to latter-day sequels like Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull--which sticks out like a sore thumb among its predecessors, even though it retains all the original elements and personnel of the original series.

As a film, The Muppets is perhaps most comparable to this year’s Woody Allen picture, Midnight In Paris.  Both have underdeveloped scripts that fall short of their massive potential, both are totally undeserving of their glowing critical reviews and giant box office receipts, and both are typical of the state of cinema in 2011, in which film-lovers are so desperate for something not to suck that we embrace the mediocre and call it great. But despite all these faults, I still find pleasure and value in both films. Ultimately I'm glad that they exist and that they succeeded.