Pinocchio (DVD)

Connect to Facebook/Twitter, recommend via email and much more.

---

In Italian writer Carlo Collodi's 1882 fairy tale, Pinocchio is a puppet, a wooden marionette in the form of a child. In Roberto Benigni's 2002 remake of the tale in which Benigni stars as the puppet, he is neither wooden nor a child. What's the point?

Benigni was a hugely popular comic actor in Italy long before he won an Oscar for "Life Is Beautiful," but I wonder if his more-recent award hasn't gone to his head? Simply appearing on screen in this live-action fantasy and acting pretentiously coy is hardly enough to entertain an audience.

My first question is why anybody would want to watch a live-action "Pinocchio" in the first place when the 1940 Disney animated version is a classic next to which all other interpretations pale. But that hasn't stopped filmmakers from coming up with dozens of variations, from live action to cartoons, none of them, understandably, very successful. There's even an adult version, "The Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio" (1971), and a horror-movie production, "Pinocchio's Revenge" (1996), if you can believe it. Well, of course, you can; we had "Chucky," so why not?

My second question is why anybody would want to see a middle-aged man in the part of the child-puppet. I mean, when Danny Kaye starred in a "Pinocchio" movie in 1976, he had the good sense to play the toymaker, Geppetto, and not the toy; and when Robin Williams played Peter Pan, he did so as an adult Pan. Did Benigni really think that his natural childlike exuberance could pass for actual childlike innocence? The result seems like a colossal self indulgence and turns out to be more of an embarrassment than an amusement.

You all know the story. The beautiful Blue Fairy (Nicoletta Braschi) enables Geppetto the toymaker (Carlo Giuffre) to create a living puppet, which he carves from a pine log and names, appropriately, Pinocchio (according to the "Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary," meaning "It: lit., pine seed, pine cone, equiv. to pin(o) PINE1 + -occhio < VL *-uc(u)lu(m), L -i-culum; see -I-, -CULE1>"). I've also heard the name interpreted as "Pine Eye," "Little Pine," "Small Pine," and "Wooden Head." The name has multiple meanings, but I like my colleague Eddie's interpretation for this production: "Blockhead."

The puppet is naive in the ways of the world and immediately gets into all sorts of trouble with a Giant puppeteer; a wily Fox and his friend the Cat; a mischievous best friend, Leonardo; a huge man-devouring shark; and various other nefarious creatures. In Benigni's hands, though, the plot rambles on endlessly, with its point that the carefree little puppet will not become a real boy until he learns responsibility rather lost to flounder at sea. Each episode is so pedestrian, so uninspired, we hardly know when one event ends and another begins. There's no zip, no spark, no imagination, no real life in the story, let alone in the puppet.

Benigni both stars and directs, so he's the guy to blame. As the star he is terribly miscast and as the director he develops no pacing to the script of any kind. The fact is, the main role is a bore and the tempo is flat. Almost the only things that work in the movie are the sets and scenery. They are often a wonder to behold, and the viewer can easily see why the film cost so much money to produce (reportedly one of the biggest budgets in the history of Italian filmmaking); but sets and scenery can't sustain our attention for long when the characters and action are so remarkably lifeless.

Let's start with Pinocchio. He no sooner comes alive than we find him an obnoxious buffoon, running amuck through the toymaker's workshop and then through the village, jumping up and down on things and generally raising Cain. There's nothing funny or entertaining about these antics, however; it's just Benigni acting wild and silly and expecting his audience to laugh for no reason. He's supposed to be joyful at the suddenness of his being alive, but his behavior is so exaggerated he's actually repellent.

Then we wonder why everyone in the village recognizes Pinocchio as a puppet when he's clearly a human being played by Benigni, and it suddenly dawns on us that we're supposed to suspend our disbelief and accept every fantasy creature in the movie as a fantasy creature even though we can see they're human actors. The cricket who becomes Pinocchio's conscience, for instance, is simply a little man in a topcoat; the Fox is a man with funny whiskers, etc. I suppose if some effort had been made to help Benigni at least look like a puppet, it would have helped; but he doesn't look like anything but a middle-aged man in a clown suit acting foolish.

In the American-dubbed version Brecklin Meyer stands in for Pinocchio's voice, but not even this works because Meyer, who was around thirty at the time, sounds about fifteen, while Benigni looks his age, which was about fifty. So in the American version the puppet's voice doesn't match the puppet's appearance. It's best to watch this thing, if you have to, in Italian with English subtitles.