‘Dumbo’ a dark elephant in the room tale
Print Edition
THE original “Dumbo” was released in the summer of 1941 while Germany was spreading across Europe and war was breaking out in the Pacific. Crafted as a simpler Disney fable after “Fantasia” disappointed at the box office, “Dumbo” — only 64 minutes in length — took flight just as far more chilling creations were taking to the air.
Eight decades later, “Dumbo” is alight again in Tim Burton’s somber and sincere live-action remake of the animated classic. Burton has refashioned “Dumbo” as a sepia-toned show-business parable tailored to more animal rights-sensitive times.
Burton’s “Dumbo,” while inevitably lacking much of the magic of the original, has charms and melancholies of its own, starting, naturally, with the elephant in the room. Of all the CGI make-overs, this Dumbo is the most textured, sweetest and most soulful of creatures. Like the original, he doesn’t speak and trips over his floppy ears. Whether cowering at a new height or finding astonishment as he, with a sneeze, is sent airborne, the digitally rendered Dumbo is one precious pachyderm.
The film opens in 1919 on the heels of World War I. Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell, who has grown into the most sensitive and consistent of leading men) returns from war, minus an arm, to his two children, Milly (Nico Parker) and Joe (Finley Hobbins). Though Dumbo endures separation from his mother in Burton’s film, the deeper grief in “Dumbo” has been transferred to the humans: The children’s mother died while Holt was away at war from an influenza.
Other things have changed, too. The traveling circus where the Farriers make their home has fallen on hard times. Settling down in Joplin, Missouri, the camp is half its former size. Its owner, Max Medici (Danny DeVito), has sold off the horses that Holt rode in his act. Medici sinks all his remaining money into an elephant that he hopes will revive the circus, only to feel swindled when she produces such a droopy-eared offspring.
Of course, Dumbo’s stock rises once he does, too, and Medici’s suddenly sensational circus quickly attracts the interest of a much more big-league circus impresario, V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton), who brings Medici’s whole circus to his Coney Island kingdom as a means, we immediately grasp, of luring Dumbo away and dispensing with the rest.
But it is wondrous when Dumbo takes flight. Burton’s camera feels genuinely mesmerized at his elephant’s magic act. The filmmaker’s recent films have been well outside his best work; it was his woeful “Alice in Wonderful” that kick-started much of the Disney live-action remakes. But when Dumbo soars, it’s clear that Burton is a believer, still, in the ability of a beautiful oddity to transcend.
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