Go, Speed Racer

I have to admit, right off the bat, that I’ve never seen an entire Speed Racer cartoon. Sure, I’ve flipped by often enough to get the basic idea, but I’m so unfamiliar with the show that I was coming into the film completely fresh. Having been away from the theaters for a few months has also ensured that I’ve not seen a trailer. I’ve commented numerous times before about my hatred of the Matrix films. I was not expecting to even see Speed Racer. Even less was I expecting to thoroughly love it.

The story is a mite thin. The characters certainly painted with broad strokes. There is a fair amount of treacle. Regardless, everything about this film worked for me, utterly and completely. It brought out a childhood thrill in me that had nothing to do with nostalgia. It hit some great buttons emotionally. And it appealed to me purely on a visual level.

Everything you need to know about the characters is shorthanded within the first few minutes. Every character is given clear, if simple designations. The Racer family is a family that lives and breathes cars. Pops builds them. His boys race them. Mom is dutiful and supportive. Speed worships his older brother Rex even after a tragic accident cuts his life and racing career short. It’s nothing complex, but the sheer marvel of how the story is presented, bouncing from plot point to plot point as Speed bounces around the track during a race.

Speed Racer has such a visual flair. It’s not common in this day and age for a film to have such a wholly unique look to it without overpowering the film. Lesser films have crumbled under enormous art direction, but every frame supports, not detracts from the film as whole. And what style. Equal parts futuristic and 50s throwback without concern that a path must be chosen. It’s its own world, and there’s no reason it needs to be any different. And even with such a wholly unique universe, there still time for various forms of animation throughout, peppering the film with some great contrast. The color palette is powerful, and it would be easy to get lost in the Technicolor wonder of it all if it weren’t for some deft work by the ensemble to keep everything grounded. The Wachowski Brothers (as is their official credit) have shown aptitude for the visual before (and the martial arts sequence here doesn’t even wink at the Matrix), but here they’ve managed to let it serve the story, rather than the opposite.

The cast is wonderful. Sure, it’s not like they’re doing Shakespeare up there, but when the story hits a treacle patch (and it does a couple times), it helps to have some talented thesps softening the blow and keeping such cartoonish outlandishness mired in real human emotion. Both Susan Sarandon and John Goodman (as Mom and Pops Racer, respectively) get the opportunity to show that less is more when it comes to sentimentality. Emile Hirsch as the titular character gets to bounce between brooding and vibrant. Christina Ricci is all smiles and pluck as Racer’s longtime lady love Trixie. Matthew Fox is icy reserve as a mysterious racer pulling the plot strings. The only weak link in the film for me is the youngest brother Spritle and his monkey pal, but I’m sure they’ll keep the eight year olds in stitches.

When dealing with the sum of the film’s best parts, I would be remiss not to mention the wonderful score. As effortlessly supportive without being distracting as the visuals. I was surprised to see that it was Michael Giacchino. I shouldn’t have been. He’s done amazing work on every project he’s been involved in.

What worked best for me though, was the underlying indictment of what’s become of sports: commerce sucking the joy out of the game. And at its core, this is a sports movie, but what makes it so wonderful is that winning the big game (or in this case the big race) isn’t about coming in first. It’s about that feeling you get when you play the game, the sheer unashamed, unrelenting, unapologetic, unadulterated love of merely playing the game. Statisticians, steroids and good old-fashioned lust for winning have ruined many a favorite past time. It may be simplistic, thematically speaking, but that’s probably true of many things easily taken for granted.

Speed Racer, not surprisingly, moves fast enough to never risk a dull moment. And if the promise of big themes is a concern, never fear. At its most basic, it’s merely a lot of fun.

A-

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