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The Office vs. Shrek the Third
I’m a Shrek fan, perhaps not the most enthusiastic in the world, but a fan nonetheless. I value the good laughs I got mainly from Shrek II, but I value them more because I could enjoy them with my entire family. That’s rare for us. I’m also a fan of THE OFFICE. We’ve been downloading the third season of The Office and my two sons and I have been watching them around the computer.
The Office, if you don’t find it too chillingly familiar as a CEO friend of mine does, is an amazingly lighthearted show. Isn’t “Will Jim and Pam get together?” a soap opera question? If so, why do my two teenage boys and I find it so compelling? The Office works because it is about character with foibles clashing with other characters with foibles. It consistently stays with what it does well. Yes, it occasionally falls down, one episode being more or less funny than another, but overall they maintain high standards. The device of the faux-documentary cameraman allows each character you follow to speak directly to you—as the camera—filling you in on thoughts and feelings you wouldn’t otherwise be privy to. There is very little magic in The Office other than solid writing, excellent timing and a ensemble cast honed to perfecting the appearance of normal.
The Shrek series has plenty of called magic to call upon: the entire panoply of mythic characters from Grimm through Disney, rendered in state of the art realistic animation. It also has the resources of a star cast and the momentum of two previous successes. How then can it all add up to such a huge disappointment? It always amazes me that Hollywood can take a success like 1 and 2, and make enough errors that coalesce into a cinematic mess. The writers (all seven, that says something) did the opposite of what The Office does. They took an excellent ensemble cast, good timing, a wicked sense of humor and added—what? Let’s go through it. First they added “meaning”—as I leaned over and said to my 12 yr old, “it’s like the film was high-jacked by a third grade teacher.” They added a new, major character (voiced by the genre-challenged Justin Timberlake) that was not only massively unappealing and unfunny, but an opportunity for this third grade teacher to “teach” us about bullying the little guy, etc. I could understand it if a studio was compelled (say by the equivalent of the federal miles per gallon standards forced onto domestic auto manufacturers) to have a certain amount of Department of Education approved “teaching” in a film, but that wouldn’t explain their ambition to “teach us” about fears of parenthood. Who exactly do they like their audience is?
On top of all this they desecrate the already seriously overused Arthurian legend. This unfunny boy, Artie, is supposedly the young King Arthur. Adding insult, they make Merlin into a ineffectual retired hippie complete with Birkenstocks and a drumming circle. What are they trying to say? Isn’t it enough to desecrate Disney’s own products like making Captain Hook secret ambition to be a flower gardener? All here villains harbor lost ambitions and it takes a very minor confrontation to turn them back into productive citizens. And the core issue is Shrek’s reluctant to (a) have enough ambition to be king which is mysteriously offered to him over the true heiress, his wife, and (b) additional reluctance to shoulder the ambitions and responsibility of fatherhood. Funny? No. Third grade teacher material? Yes. Well, sort of, but maybe someone speaking to young adults (who will hate this preachy film). But comedy? No, not even close. So how does a studio take millions of dollars, a huge cast including comic talents like Mike Meyers, John Cleese, Eric Idle, and Eddie Murphy. Ok, Eddie Murphy isn’t that funny when he’s in a fat suit, but he does good sidekick.
My first inkling that something was wrong came early when the father-King frog died for a protracted scene. Remind me, what’s funny about a guy dying for a long, long, time again? Then there’s a whole scene at a medieval high school full of flat, dated “valleyspeak” that the kids have moved on from years ago. How old are these writers? Are they all pregnant with their first child? It all goes on painfully long, unredeemed even by the credits, which were quite funny in Shrek II.
It’s hard to understand let alone explain a fiasco like this. Was the person in charge humor-impaired? Or perhaps they were not able to lead a huge machine like this, and ended up taking one or two bits from everyone, the whole never adding up. Was there an unfunny heavy boot from the studio? Did the studio want to make less money for some obscure stock-buy back scheme comprehensible only to the inner circle? We will never know. Maybe even the director, writers and cast can’t explain it. It’s like the fall of Rome. It happened; there are theories, but they are in the end just theories.
