GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 5/1/08)

VIEW FILM STILLS: Speed Racer

One of the most genuinely confounding films to come along in years, the Wachowski Brothers' follow-up to The Matrix trilogy is, if viewed from one angle, the most headache inducing kid's movie of them all; if viewed from another, it's the most expensive avant-garde film ever made. Adapted by the Wachowskis from the popular Japanese animated TV series about the travails of a heroic young driver and his goofy family, this is not a film occurring in an alternate or imaginary reality; rather, it is a film of no reality, that is, a picture that changes the rules of its universe strictly according to its creators' whims. Hence, the film is likely to inspire even more heavy thinking on the part of cultural theorists than The Matrix did. Particularly since the narrative of Speed Racer, such as it is, is one of the more blatantly anti-capitalist storylines to come down the cinematic pike since, I dunno, Bertolucci's 1900.

The bright, candy-colored universe the Wachowskis fashion out of digital and green screen wizardry is often psychedelic in the extreme. I've read some internet effects mavens complaining about the cheez-whizziness of the look, pointing out repetitions of figures in digital crowd renderings. I think all of that is precisely the point. The picture opens by attempting to digitally radicalize cinematic language, with multiple storylines — young Speed Racer's car obsession, relationship with older brother Rex Racer, Rex's tragic fall from grace, and death, and a "here and now" race in which Speed has the opportunity to break a record set by his older brother, and doesn't take it — coming at you in a big bright space-time ball, with no cuts but rather central figures from each story horizontally "wiping" the screen to create transition. Alas, this radicalization of film language, while certainly impressive to behold, yields heretofore un-dreamed of levels of narrative incoherence, but hey, not every experiment succeeds. Once all that back-story is cleared away, things get a little more linear, but the Wachowskis continue to insert space-time hiccups. After Speed (Hirsch, who's trim and makes a lot of intense faces), his family (a detached-looking Goodman as Pops, super-sincere Sarandon as Mom, thoroughly irritating — on purpose, of course — Litt as younger brother Spritle, and some chimp) and girlfriend Trixie (Ricci, who really ought to keep her Louise-Brooks-goes-anime hairdo) are brought to the big city for wooing by mega-mogul Royalton (Allam, who seems to be channeling pundit Christopher Hitchens), Speed turns the smooth talker down. This doesn't sit well with the industrialist, who sneers at Pop Racer's backyard mechanic ethos, and lets slip his mask to reveal to Speed how the house always wins — that the race victory of a past idol (Roundtree) was a complete fix, how all the Grand Prix races were fixed, and how if Speed won't play along he'll get shut out of racing, his father and his craft will be disgraced, and probably worse. As Royalton unfolds his vision of doom we see it taking place; is this a projection, or a flash-forward? It's both. But the effect of how it's shown here is to make it neither, in a way.