Kickin’ the Tires
Cars, the latest vehicle to roll off Pixar’s assembly line, answers that age-old question: What would Doc Hollywood have been like had it been populated entirely by cars?
If that premise — hotshot (in this case, a hot rod) gets stranded in a small town on his way to Los Angeles and finds love among the ruins of what used to be paradise — doesn’t exactly rev your engine, fret not. Cars takes a little longer than Pixar’s spit-shined classics to get from zero to 60, but it eventually gets you where you want to go: the promised land of impulse-purchase trinkets and happy endings.
It’s hard to embrace a movie that casts yee-har-dee-harrin’ Larry the Cable Guy as a redneck tow truck. Yet Cars is director John Lasseter’s most elegiac offering, an ode to the bygone days of dusty roads winding through small towns in which nothing ever happens except the crawling of time. Odd that a movie about a race car named Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson, who never sounds in a hurry to get anywhere) would wind up the least frenetic of Pixar’s offerings; compared with this, Finding Nemo and A Bug’s Life positively vibrate.
Cars takes as its jumping-off point the 1952 Disney short Susie, The Little Blue Coupe, which tracks the life of a cherubic vehicle as she rolls off the assembly line and finds new life as a race car. Susie eventually, and very metaphorically, gave birth to The Love Bug in 1969, which makes Cars less a work of wonder than the modernizing of a hoary classic. We’ve seen this before — a claim that one couldn’t make about earlier Pixar movies, which weren’t constructed from quite so many pieces lifted from the cartoon junkyard.
As for the story itself, well, it is Doc Hollywood, with Wilson’s Lightning in the Michael J. Fox role as the brash upstart trapped in a small town (Radiator Springs) and forced into community service after tearing up Main Street. There, he meets the outwardly gruff Doc Hudson (Paul Newman), who has a soft spot under the hood for the kid who considers himself a champ without a title. Lightning inevitably has to choose between small-town life with a small-town wife (Sally Carrera, the purple Porsche voiced by Bonnie Hunt) and the big-time racing spotlight. Whatever will he do?
Cars feels less like a heartfelt statement from a shrewd businessman doubling as a visionary director — a tinkerer and a dreamer, as Richard Corliss rhapsodized about Lasseter in a recent issue of Time — than something created to move product. And it took six guys to write this? That can’t be right.
What ultimately redeems Cars is its soul. Lasseter loves these objects as though they were kin, and it shows in every beautifully rendered frame. And so the movie slowly grows on you, in spite of its familiarity and the fact that it’s a disappointment following the grown-up comic book that was The Incredibles. Stay for the ending, which tricks up scenes from Pixar’s previous outings and makes you miss them even more.
