By Jake Wilson
DUMBO
PG, 112 minutes
★★★½
The old joke goes that the man employed to shovel up elephant dung at the circus is asked why he doesn't quit and look for a better job. "What," he protests, "and leave show business?"
Colin Farrell (left), Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins in a scene from Dumbo.Credit: AP
In Tim Burton's live-action Dumbo, the gag is re-created literally if not quite explicitly, as if to say that Burton will do whatever it takes to stay in the game. Let's face it, no re-imagining of Dumbo was likely to match the magic of the 1941 original, one of the most brilliantly imaginative of all Disney cartoons.
Still, Burton has given this impossible task his best shot, and the result is one of his more personal recent films, with plenty of his characteristic touches and themes. Dumbo, the baby elephant mocked for his big ears, is the kind of outcast Burton has favoured ever since his 1990 masterpiece Edward Scissorhands. The circus turns out to be a haven for any number of flamboyant misfits, echoing the depiction of Z-grade filmmaking in another Burton classic, Ed Wood.
Danny DeVito plays the irascible but warm-hearted ringmaster Max Medici. Credit: Jay Maidment
In hindsight, the original Dumbo looks like a more pointed allegory than Walt Disney and his team may have consciously intended, touching on class division and even racism. An updated version of the material might have brought this subtext closer to the surface, but Burton and screenwriter Ehren Kruger go in a different direction. With the setting shifted back to 1919, the film becomes an origin story for modern show business, born in the crucible of the First World War.
This only reinforces our awareness of the trauma at the story's heart. Like his cartoon prototype, Burton's computer-generated Dumbo is a silent, mostly passive protagonist, pining for his lost mother and fearful of the spotlight – though the talking animal characters who originally surrounded him are mostly absent, replaced with human friends and foes.
Colin Farrell plays Holt Farrier, a trick rider who has lost an arm in the war and his wife in the influenza epidemic. What remains is his two young children Milly and Joe (Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins) and a job caring for the elephants at a struggling circus overseen by irascible but warm-hearted ringmaster Max Medici (Danny DeVito, one of several Burton semi-regulars in the cast).
Dumbo, the newest addition to the circus family, turns out to be its salvation: the revelation that he can fly comes fairly early on, propelling us into a brand new chapter of his story. As a nationwide celebrity, he attracts the attention of the preening entrepreneur V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton) who offers to buy Medici's circus, installing its star attraction at the heart of a grandiose art deco fun park that curiously resembles a forerunner to Disneyland itself.
Michael Keaton and Eva Green in Tim Burton's live-action remake of Dumbo.Credit: Jay Maidment
Naturally the offer is not as benign as it looks, so Burton is able to go to town dramatising the nightmare side of the entertainment industry, venturing as far into morbidity as he dares. While nothing is as alarming as the 1941 film's famously psychedelic "pink elephants on parade" sequence, echoes of the same queasiness are felt throughout: the palette is keyed to the sickly pink of clouds at sunrise or sunset, often visible on the horizon between the circus tents.
Like much of its director's recent work, Dumbo can be viewed as a superior hack job with an undertone of stark negativity: terror, after all, is the main emotion that propels Dumbo into flight. Yet where sheer visual fluency is concerned, Burton puts rivals such as Wes Anderson and Guillermo del Toro in the shade. His secret is that the cartoonish exaggerations of his style are not merely decorative, but a way of giving concrete expression to paradoxical meanings: the circus is innocent and corrupt, Dumbo is adorable and grotesque, while stardom is a dream and a trap.
"Don't let anyone tell you what you can't do," Vandevere tells the budding scientist Milly, an inspirational platitude that doubles in context as a chilling expression of megalomania. Such contradictions have always been the stock-in-trade of Burton, a man who has made a fortune by getting us to sympathise with tortured outsiders – and who can go to work for the Disney organisation while continuing to warn of the risks of getting into bed with billionaires.