A very old, and therefore wise, man once said: "My Homer is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is not a porn star."
You'll just have to take it on faith that, much like Abraham's bout of prophecy in "The Simpsons Movie," this will all make sense once it's too late to make a difference.
It's been a long time since movie theaters have put on a farce for grown-ups. In these perhaps too serious times, film audiences want their comedy either savage or devoid of thought. The sitcom and the cartoon (the crowns of which "The Simpsons" television series has held for several years at a time) have taken over the space previously reserved for big-budget nonsense musicals, romantic comedies of the Oscar Wilde kind and the entire genre that is the Marx Brothers.
It's a bit quaint then that, in moving to the big screen, "The Simpsons" goes back to classic farce one-upmanship and the "well-made plot" formula that has been attacked by critics under many names since Aristotle (although, tellingly, he himself was always for it).
But it's also a testament to the unfailing brilliance of the show's original writers (including Matt Groening, James L. Brooks, Al Jean and Mike Scully) that this relic feels new and timely, and that "The Simpsons" almost accomplishes its goal of pleasing everyone. This is a movie made almost solely to garner laughs, and it does that in spades, although rarely to the thought-provoking depths or dizzying heights of the very best episodes. The movie pokes fun at both authority figures and mob mentality, but satire is definitely not the aim here.
In its rush to win over an audience that has probably only warily agreed to see what is more-or-less an extended episode of a series that, by all rights, should be dead by now, "The Simpsons" hits the ground running in every direction. The first 15 minutes feel more like a series of sketches than a coherent plot arc and have a few too many obvious "this is a movie" jokes. In contrast, one of the best bits of the opening relies not on that expected gag, but instead pulls a lightning-quick double take (featuring my fifth favorite character, Comic Book Guy) on the audience that showcases why the self-references in the show work so well.
The almost-schizophrenic opening act does pay off later, as it allows the writers to set up several important — and delightfully implausible — plot elements without drawing attention to them. The rapid-fire jokes here seem to be tailor-made for the obsessive freeze-framing DVD-collector types the show has amassed.
Once the device of Abe's prophecy comes into play, however, the movie becomes more of, well, a movie. Overall, "The Simpsons Movie" is about halfway between the pace and tone of the earlier seasons and the later ones. Unfortunately, being even in the middle means there are still a few too many "Homer is really dumb" physical comedy moments.
Director David Silverman, a longtime but not, in this reviewer's opinion, principal contributor to "The Simpsons," does a fairly good job adapting the series to the silver screen. Some of the 3D effects draw too much attention to themselves, but the general look of the movie is simply, and admirably, a more detailed, polished version of the show.
The actors (although much less over-the-top here) deliver some of their best work, including an outstanding performance in Julie Kavner's Marge, in which she manages to make Marge's increasingly unlistenable gravelly mumble vulnerable and affecting. Dan Castellaneta, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer, as usual, give full and uproarious life to dozens of characters, often in the same scene, without ever drawing attention to themselves as actors.
Silverman's only major misstep is in accepting C-grade work from the film score world's biggest hack, Hans Zimmer. Zimmer's score here makes Danny Elfman's "songs" in Tim Burton's "Willy Wonka" seem like the sure-fire hits Elfman has been trying to replicate for years (all derived, of course, from "The Simpsons" theme).
"The Simpsons" is a movie that positively screams for at least a few over-the-top musical numbers, but all the audience gets is a clever (in the script) and trite (in the composition) theme for Lisa and a few, admittedly hilarious, bits of the debt the show's creators owe to comic books, in the form of varying parodies of the "Spiderman" TV theme.
Zimmer and his cohorts barely even score the rest of the movie, which for the first half is often distractingly silent between the jokes. This really is inexcusable, given the show's many, many musical highlights. Series composer Alf Clausen doesn't have the name recognition of Zimmer or Elfman, but if TV writers can make a movie, then by the Lord All-Diddily, so can he.
Those hallowed writers' only flaw in the consistently creative, crackling and heartfelt script (by which "The Simpsons" has always lived and died) is its slight hypocrisy toward its own moral and protagonist: When a film proudly proclaims its flimsy stand-alone status, how on Earth could it leave a tie-in with the show completely absent?
It's no secret the old writers and producers have pretty much wrung their hand of the show, and perhaps they plan on moving to Alaska and never turning on the TV again after putting the film to pasture, but to so callously leave Springfield to its fate shows that realistically, but disappointingly all the same, Homer doesn't learn his lesson after all. Even old senile Abe sees more dignity in Homer than his real fathers, who, if wanting to say that you can't teach people anything, shouldn't have left the viewer with a false happy ending.
But all this is probably over-thinking a movie that opens with a mouse impaling a cat on the moon with the American flag. Go, laugh, and hope that in the end, a certain chronically overlooked character is telling the truth with the single word, "sequel?"
3 stars out of 5
