by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was The
Adventures of Tintin — the name is annoyingly
pronounced “Tin-Tin” throughout the movie instead of the correct “Tanh-Tanh”
the character’s original creator, the French-speaking Belgian artist Hergé
(true name: Georges Remy), would have intended — directed by Steven Spielberg
using a blend of computer animation and so-called “motion capture” (the
business of outfitting a live performer, or in this case an entire live cast,
with green suits and red lights so their actions can be photographed,
programmed into a computer and an entirely new body, digitally created, can be
grafted onto their own). Spielberg even cast the actor who’s become the
uncrowned king of motion capture, Andy Serkis, as the boy Tintin’s adult
sidekick, the drunkard Captain Haddock — Serkis has previously played Gollum
the renegade hobbit in The Lord of the Rings, King Kong in Peter Jackson’s recent remake, and
Caesar the earth-conquering super-chimpanzee in the surprisingly good Rise
of the Planet of the Apes, and I
inevitably joked that someday Andy Serkis is going to make a movie in which
he’s photographed normally and looks the way he does in real life … and nobody
will recognize him.
The Adventures of Tintin was based on two of the original Hergé comic
series, “The Secret of the Unicorn” and “Red Rackham’s Treasure” (by coincidence “The Secret of the Unicorn” was my introduction to Tintin’s character in the
old Children’s Digest
magazine, which ran it serially, but by the time they got to the end of the
story I found out it was merely a prologue to “Red Rackham’s Treasure” and got
so disgusted that when my mom let my subscription to Children’s Digest expire I didn’t really mind — even back then I was disgusted with serial stories!), and though
it got indifferent-to-negative reviews and didn’t do especially well in the
U.S. (though it turned a good profit on foreign sales to countries in which the
Tintin character has always been more popular than here), I found it a charmer
start-to-finish, one of the few successful attempts at creating deliberate
camp. It has its problems: the succession of improbable (to say the least!)
situations and hair’s-breadth escapes for our heroes (Tintin, Haddock and
Snowy, Tintin’s cute white dog) strains credibility, and as good as the CGI was
there were times the obvious phoniness of things like Haddock’s beard and
Snowy’s fur got to me and I wished Spielberg had shot the thing in normal
live-action instead (though Charles argued that live-action would have been the
wrong medium for the improbable world of the Tintin comics, whose entire appeal
rests on making him a sort of super-youth whose accomplishments are far beyond
the norm for his age — Hergé described him as 12, though he looks more like
about 17 on screen and the actor playing him, Jamie Bell, was 25 when the film
was shot — and on creating such wildly improbable plot situations that the
stories eventually became parodies of themselves), and the uncertain lurching
back and forth of Haddock’s character between besottedness and sobriety got
wearing after a while.
The good news is that Steven Spielberg may not be the most profound or artistic
director working in films today, but he’s by quite a wide margin the most
assured one technically: whatever the values of the stories he films, he knows
when to move the camera, when to hold it still, when to let a scene run, when
to cut, when to go in for a close-up and when not to, and whatever you think of
his films he always gives a sense of broad professional competence far above
the aimless cuttings of too many modern directors. He’s also got the advantage
of a script (by Steven Moffat and Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish) that’s well
constructed and manages to sustain its high spirits and energy level instead of
flagging for dull, boring exposition scenes in between the action highlights
like so many sorry films today do, and the dazzling series of references to
other movies and other media (perhaps it’s because I love opera, but I
especially liked the plot twist of having the villain engage an opera singer,
Kim Stengel as “Bianca Castafiore, the Milanese Nightingale,” whose high note
will shatter the glass encasing the third model of the old ship Unicorn which the villain, Daniel “James Bond” Craig as
Sakharine, a.k.a. “Sugar Additive,” needs to get the third part of a coded
message containing the location of a hidden treasure) adds to the appeal of the
story instead of just sitting there as if the director and writer couldn’t
resist the temptation to go, “Hey! Ain’t we clever?”
In 2006 Charles and I
watched a documentary called Tintin et Moi [see below] at the public library, a film about Hergé and his famous character made
in Europe and based on the taped interviews Hergé recorded for journalist Numa
Sadoul, who was helping him with his autobiography (and the filmmakers noted
that he heavily edited the resulting manuscript, with the outcome that there
are parts of the autobiography that don’t even come close to matching what’s on
the tapes) and one which raised the question of how Hergé’s conservative Roman
Catholicism and his willingness to publish in a Nazi-owned paper, Le Soir, during the Occupation affected the Tintin stories.
This show made the point that by keeping him 12 (though Hergé created Tintin
stories for 40 years and updated the backgrounds, settings and accoutrements of
life to keep them contemporary, he never let Tintin age) Hergé avoided having
to depict him having any sort of sex life — though as depicted in this film the
Tintin adventures are so relentlessly paced one can’t imagine him having time for sex! The Adventures of Tintin is a marvelous movie, a piece of trivia but
well-made and totally engaging trivia, and after the heavy-duty political
meeting Charles and I had been to earlier that night it was a lot of fun!
