Define "Hoedown"

They arrived in theatres on the same weekend, and seem destined to be alphabetized side by side on video-store shelves forevermore: they’re Wanted and Wall•E, which I took in at back-to-back matinees on Saturday afternoon. Thankfully, I saw Wall•E second, so I didn’t have to go home with the sour taste of Wanted in my mouth. Would I sound like too much of a moral scold if I said that Wall•E symbolizes every good impulse in Hollywood filmmaking, and Wanted every corrupt one? Or would I just sound like someone who can properly evaluate the evidence of his own eyeballs?

I have to admit, I was resistant to Wall•E when I saw the trailer. The voiceover narration seemed too precious, the character design of Wall•E too aggressively adorable—as though the Pixar team had used some state-of-the-art algorithm to determine precisely which eyeball circumference would push Wall•E's Keane-painting cuteness to the absolute maximum. And I was a sourfaced naysayer on the last couple of Pixar features: Cars, with its unappealing character design and hand-me-down plot; and Ratatouille, which had an astonishing look but (to my mind) a thematically muddled script and some poorly thought-through human characters. (I’m surprised more reviewers didn’t give Brad Bird a harder time for the way he conceived the character of Anton Ego, which revives every lazy, popular cliché of the critic as a joyless misanthrope who’d much rather hate things than love them.)

But Wall•E was written and directed by Andrew Stanton, who has always struck me as the true unsung genius of Pixar—he also directed Finding Nemo and co-directed the hugely underrated A Bug’s Life, both of which strike me as, along with Wall•E, Pixar’s finest achievements, solidly told stories whose affection for underdogs and humble characters seems genuinely heartfelt. If there’s such a thing as a signature, touchstone Stanton image, it’s of his overmatched main character openly quaking in fear when confronted with a much larger antagonist.

And Wall•E, the dutiful robot who continues to convert Earth’s trash into cubes and arrange it in stacks higher than the Empire State Building, is Stanton’s most appealing hero yet. It’s a little unclear whether he’s developed his quirky personality—his affection for unusual bits of detritus, which he uses to decorate his surprisingly cozy lair—as a result simply of being in operation for 700 years, or if that personality was part of his original programming, but I love the way he’s been able to preserve his childlike wonder in a world whose previous inhabitants have left it in such a sorry shape. With his utilitarian design, and those big, sappy eyes that make it impossible for him to hide his emotions—yes, the eyes finally won me over!—Wall•E is the opposite of cool.

Wanted, on the other hand, is a movie that can’t stop trying to impress you with how cool it is. A lot of these CGI-enhanced “whoa-isn’t-this-awesome” action movies cropped up in the wake of The Matrix, and what always amazes me about them is how their notion of what’s incredibly cool is always incredibly lame: sludgy metal bands, people leaping through windows in slow-motion, an adolescent attitude toward women that’s comfortable with leering at them but terrified of touching them. There’s a scene in Wanted where the hero, played by James McAvoy, smashes someone in the face with a computer keyboard—some of the keys fly into the air and momentarily spell “FUCK YOU” before crashing to the ground. (The second “U” is formed by one of the victim’s molars.) It may be the most childish, moronic screenwriting notion I’ve seen in a movie all year, but in the film, it’s the moment when the hero finally becomes a man.

Wanted spends a lot of time, actually, obsessing over what makes a man: McAvoy is constantly exhorting himself to “grow a pair,” to “nut up” and “stop being a pussy.” Again, I hate to sound like a moralistic prick, but my God, what a sickening view of manhood this movie presents: McAvoy “becomes a man” by joining a secret society of assassins and becoming a stone cold killing machine.

The movie has a bizarre cosmology—McAvoy’s assignments (and those of his fellow assassins) are encoded into the cloth woven by a gigantic medieval apparatus called, and I am not making this up, The Loom of Fate. The idea is that the Loom always knows best—if you kill the people it tells you to, you’ll prevent the deaths of thousands more. A more responsible movie could portray the assassins’ work as the grim business it is without betraying its comic-book tone, but Wanted depicts killing people as a fun, sexy lark. I can think of few movie moments more grotesque than the smirk McAvoy exchanges with Jolie as they pull off a particularly acrobatic hit—I can’t fathom how Jolie reconciles her humanitarian real-life work with her willingness to appear in a movie as misanthropic as Wanted.

I don’t use the word “misanthropic” lightly, either: McAvoy’s final monologue is an expression of naked contempt for “average” people... really, for precisely the kind of person who would go to Wanted and hope for a good time. “I used to be ordinary and pathetic,” McAvoy says. “Like you.” He then describes his new life as an elite killer, and concludes the film by taking his eye away from the scope on his sniper's rifle, turning to us and asking, “What the fuck did you ever do?”

But to be honest, the film has tipped its hand much earlier with its treatment of McAvoy’s boss Janice at the soul-killing office where he works before Angelina Jolie whisks him away. The character is an overweight woman whom McAvoy sarcastically introduces as “my anorexic boss,” and who’s seldom seen without a jelly donut in her hand or a piece of birthday cake in her mouth. She’s a petty tyrant, and when McAvoy finally snaps and quits his job, he dresses her down in front of the entire office, telling her that everybody hates her... which is a shame, because if she were just a bit nicer, everyone would feel sorry for her instead. Hatred or pity: these are the only emotions that Wanted can imagine feeling towards an overweight woman. Our final image of Janice is a freeze-frame of her in her car, mouth wide open as she secretly scarfs down yet another donut.

Compare that to the scenes in Wall•E aboard the spaceship Axiom, which is populated by Earth’s pampered refugee humans, now reduced to morbidly obese lumps in hoverchairs so comfortable that they’ve forgotten how to walk... or even to look up from their video screens. (How they even reproduce anymore is one of the film’s unanswered questions.)

It’s an acid commentary on the greedy, lazy North American lifestyle, but Stanton isn’t content to give even these overfed babies some extra dimensions: amidst the havoc Wall•E inadvertently wreaks aboard the Axiom, a couple of humans get knocked off their chairs. As if waking from a dream, they blink and stare in wonder at the universe they’ve always ignored outside their window and to revel in the unfamiliar feel of human contact. Similarly, up in the helm, the ship’s captain has been roused from his stupor and spends hours at the videoscreen, drinking in information about the wonderful place Earth used to be and all the things human beings used to do there... when they could actually move around. (My favourite line from the film: “Define ‘hoedown.’”)

Wall•E views humans as naïve, destructive, self-indulgent, and easily misguided, but ultimately worth preserving. (No race that created Hello, Dolly! can be all bad, right?) Wanted wouldn’t lose any sleep if someone put a bullet through all our brains.