GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 2/20/08)

A would-be heart-tugging, inspiring paean to the do-it-yourself ethic/aesthetic and its concomitant community-building powers, the latest film from visual lo-fi innovator Michel Gondry is slight and finally unconvincing, alas.

The picture begins by positing Passaic, New Jersey, as the birthplace of jazz artist Fats Waller, and the antique video store of the title, Be Kind Rewind, as inhabiting the building where Waller was born. The proudly out-of-date enterprise, owned by Glover's kindly oldster Mr. Fletcher and largely run by Mike (Def), more or less Fletcher's adoptive son. Mike's nothing-but-trouble pal Jerry (Black, whose keyed-up anticness starts to wear thin pretty early on here), who lives in a trailer by an auto repair joint and some power transformers, is constantly messing around in the VHS-only emporium, which is in danger of being razed by developers. After Fletcher takes off on a pilgrimage (to do more digging into Waller's life, he tells Mike; in fact he's off to research the practices of his video store competitors), Jerry suffers an improbable mishap after trying to sabotage the power lines: his brain becomes magnetized. This erases all the tapes at Be Kind Rewind. Desperately seeking to assuage lovely but demanding customers like Farrow's Miss Falewicz, Jerry and Mike go about creating homemade remakes of the likes of Ghostbusters, Men in Black, and many more. Soon their efforts are joined by spunky local girl Alma (Diaz). Rather than balking at the crude but often innovative and energetic frauds, the "Sweded" versions catch on and create a local craze. Soon everybody wants in — on both the making and the viewing.

Gondry throws in more than a handful of the anti-CGI special visual effects that are his stock in trade throughout. But with this film he's less concerned with impressing via the humble wizardry of cinematic trompe l'oeil than making a statement. The people, one character notes, ought to be "stockholders of their own happiness!" That's the most overtly Situationist bit of rhetoric in the movie, and it's kind of nifty to hear such stuff in an English-language movie with stars and everything in it… but for a picture that makes to celebrate "movies with heart" there's too much of an air of contrivance around it. Part of the problem's the writing: Gondry's just not that good at it. His first two features, Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, were at the very least co-written with the ingenious Charlie Kaufman; this and his prior picture, The Science of Sleep (an occasionally diverting but ultimately overly self-involved coming-of-age fantasy) were from Gondry solo scripts, and they're a bit on the thin side. The whole Fats Waller business, for instance; clearly Gondry wanted to pay homage to an icon, but his way of shoehorning him into the narrative via Mr. Fletcher's fiction (concocted to make Mike proud of where he's from) of Waller's origins is more than a little forced.

Finally, Gondry might have been better off keeping his movie on theoretical/slapstick grounds, because, quite frankly, his attempts at sincerity just don't make it. Be Kind Rewind ends on an up but indeterminate note for Fletcher, his charges, and the rest of Passaic; it's the kind of thing a lot of critics call Capraesque, although it's not precisely that. But Gondry's version of it doesn't sit too well in the heart and mind; one feels he wants you to buy something he himself can't be bothered to believe in.

— Glenn Kenny