Super, Ordinary
Since its initial publication in 1986, several filmmakers have signed up to adapt Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ comic book Watchmen, in which costumed superheroes have been outlawed and are being executed by an unknown baddie. Darren Aronofsky (Pi) is set to direct a screenplay by X-Men scribe David Hayter next year, but no one has yet been cast; its arrival is doubtful. But perhaps there is no need for a Watchmen movie at this late date, not when Pixar offers The Incredibles, the darkest feel-good fable thus far spun by the makers of toy stories and fish tales.
The Incredibles, written and directed by Brad Bird (The Iron Giant, a masterpiece without the box office to show for it), is a hybrid of several sources: James Bond movies, 1960s angst-ridden Marvel comics (especially The Fantastic Four, a forthcoming movie now also rendered moot), the Spy Kids movies, and Saturday-morning cartoons starring super friends and other costumed hangers-on. But its main influence appears to be Watchmen, among the first comics to wonder about the private, often troubled lives of heroes once they shed their spandex skins and resume their secret identities. These flawed, troubled humans became heroes not because they were noble or generous but because they liked to flex their muscles — or because they were megalomaniacs or just plain nuts. Still, they talked like us, bled like us and loved like us, and you could almost imagine these heroes as next-door neighbors going off to their day jobs, which often involved saving the world.
In The Incredibles, that’s precisely what they are: Bob Parr (voiced by Craig T. Nelson) is an insurance salesman helping poor clients leap through loopholes in their restrictive contracts. Bob used to be known as the invincible Mr. Incredible, until the government outlawed superheroes. Bob and his wife, Helen, once known as Elastigirl (voiced by Holly Hunter), have gone into the superhero relocation program, along with their speedster son, Dash (Spencer Fox), and disappearing daughter, Violet (NPR commentator Sarah Vowell). Among the other banished heroes is Lucius Best, aka Frozone (Samuel L. Jackson), the coolest of all heroes, with the ability to freeze anything, as long as there’s moisture in the air.
Bob, his hair receding and his gut expanding, is itching to get back in the hero biz. He and Lucius have even taken to surreptitiously listening to a police scanner, in search of late-night adventures denied them. This doesn’t sit well with Helen, who’s stretched thin, as it were, trying to pretend hers is a normal family. “Reliving the glory days is better than pretending they didn’t happen at all,” Bob shouts at Helen. When there are no bad guys left to fight, Bob and Helen do battle with each other, and it’s to Bird’s credit that he doesn’t reduce the Parrs to cartoon characters. Their disappointments are familiar; so, too, are their longings to be seen as something more special than suburban statistics.
Bob is rescued from his funk by an invitation to once again don the supersuit to destroy a rampaging robot. But he’s only being set up by a new villain who was once an old acolyte, a creep named Syndrome (Jason Lee) who once idolized Mr. Incredible but was sent packing by the hero, who claimed he preferred to work alone. Syndrome has been killing off heroes, working his way toward Mr. Incredible to settle an old score.
This is all grim, grown-up stuff, but Bird keeps it from sinking in the depressing muck. He prefers the sweet to the sour, as evidenced in The Iron Giant, about a lonely little boy finding a father figure in a kindly 100-foot-tall robot from outer space. Bob easily fits in the Pixar pantheon of would-be daddies — Sulley from Monsters, Inc., Marlin from Finding Nemo — trying to find time for family. Yes, The Incredibles is beautiful to look at, but it’s even lovelier beneath the computer-generated surfaces. Bird’s is just a different kind of fairy tale, one with its roots in the modern-day comic book, in which the invincible can be hurt and the super are just ordinary after all.
