Routledge Mental Health

Jim Carrey did it again. He once more played a city worker with an array of repressed personal problems (ranging from Oedipal hatred to inability to relate to his family) whose unexpressed pain one day escapes and takes a fantastic form. When released, the runaway anxiety reveals the protagonist’s own dark side.

Which makes Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011, directed by Mark Waters) a typical trickster film, complete with crazy animals and scatological references. Mr Popper, a terribly busy divorced executive, lives on his own in a very expensive flat. His teenage daughter rejects his offer of advice about boyfriends; his son thinks his father never has time for fun; and his ex wife dates nice, good looking, family-oriented men. Mr. Popper is lonely in his huge, two-level apartment. Apart from this personal crisis, his professional life starts to suffer as well: a crucial property deal falls through when a wealthy old widow (Angela Lansbury) refuses to sell him a restaurant in an important location. Underlying all these real-life problems is a classical psychoanalytic issue which needs attending to, but which Mr. Popper refuses to acknowledge: he had an ‘absent’ father, a polar adventurer, who kept going away thus avoiding his parental responsibilities. Mr. Popper’s professional success is a shield against his internal turmoil. To make this point more prominent, the film’s creators summed it up in a metaphor: when the hero bashes his leg on a box on the way out to work, he cringes in agony – but does not stop for a second. He rushes out of the door with the cry ‘No time for pain!’.

Such is the film’s psycho-narrative premise. Now to the trigger of the principal storyline. It is clear to the audience that Mr. Popper’s denial of his problems is not going to end well. And indeed it does not. One day someone sends him a frozen penguin, which quickly unfreezes itself, settles in the expensive flat and causes a number of emergencies starting with a cataclysmic bathroom flood. Five more penguins soon arrive in a box, and Mr. Popper’s life is changed forever. His orderly existence is disrupted. The penguins, who are running around, crying at the top of their heinous voices and pooping at the most inappropriate moments, are impossible to get rid of because not a single bureaucratic department in the city deals with this kind of animals. When thrown out, the penguins always come back because they see their host as a ‘proxy parent’. The only way to appease the beasts is by showing them Chaplin films – they respond to the ‘trickster energy’ emanated by the Tramp.

Mr. Popper has to hide his terrible secret behind closed doors. Metaphorically speaking (as Stanley Ipkiss famously used to say in The Mask), the penguins represent their host’s dark, unconscious side; his suppressed unsolved issues. Throughout the film, the decent businessman has to face this side of himself, and by facing it and dealing with it, he goes through a number of positive and negative transformations. As in many trickster films, after a most dreadful debacle which culminates in the protagonist becoming a jobless tramp, all ends well. The executive makes up with his internal father, regains his family and makes a trip to the South Pole to restore the penguins to their habitat. He also gets the covetable restaurant deal and wins the approval of his colleagues and bosses. The restaurant has special significance for Mr Popper as he used to come there with his father whenever the father was available. In other words, it is a symbol of family reunion. The personal and the professional aspects of his life – the biggest psycho-social split of urban living – are finally brought together and start co-existing in harmony.

Now, all this sounds terribly smooth and wonderfully psychotherapeutic. And to some extent it is. The film is a fairytale, and its archetypal base is indeed effective and built to trigger the correct projective-introjective response in the viewer. But archetypes are deep, large structures and rarely fail to work. On the higher narrative levels, however, the situation is different. Mr Popper’s Penguins suffers from the blatant commercial archetypalism of contemporary Hollywood cinema in that it is a narrative muddle, carelessly edited and turned into a series of oversimplified, reductive statements about the state of the urban worker’s psyche and his ability to deal with the complex psycho-social reality of the post-industrial world.

Mr Popper is certainly not an original creation amongst Carrey’s extensive repertoire. The protagonist’s problems with his estranged family are suspiciously similar to Fletcher Reede’s issues in Liar Liar (1996). Frankly speaking, I am getting a bit tired of Carrey’s confused executives trying to deal with their inner tricksters. In The Mask (1994) the white collar-worker’s other self takes the shape of a hyperactive green man; in Yes Man (2008) the hero’s anxiety transforms into a challenge to say ‘yes’ to everything that comes his way; the lawyer in Liar Liar is bewitched into saying truth all the time; in Fun With Dick and Jane (2005) the sacked bank employee becomes a tramp and a looter; the shadow side of the city worker in I Love You Philip Morris (2009) is a conman. Carrey takes the iconic profession of the post-industrial society and turns it into a suffering figure, a Christ-like redeemer of postmodern sins.

Neither does the film look original within its own genre, which includes Adam Sandler’s disillusioned office clerks (Anger Management, 2003; Click, 2006) and Mel Gibson’s ‘mad but talented’ loner executive in What Women Want (2000). Besides, the hero’s Oedipal struggle reminds one of several other ‘deficient/dead father’ narratives including Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), and The Lion King (Allers and Minkoff, 1994).

Which leads me to the following thought: if you are planning to write a successful screenplay, use the above mentioned concoction of the Oedipal dynamic and masculine maturation issues. In the ‘godless’, ‘fatherless’ world which is characterised by family breakdown, disintegration of community and crisis of authority on all levels, the audience will always want to see a protagonist dealing with his father problems and trying to decide for himself what the concept of authority actually means. Especially if this protagonist belongs to the realm of business, in which order and disorder, authority and disobedience, disaster and success are separated by a very thin line.

Russell Crowe is the perfect actor for the role of a heroically loyal husband: plump-cheeked, blue-eyed, with the frame of a giant teddy bear whose facial expressions range from a tender-powerful look implying ‘you can always rely on me’ to the pained grimace of a reluctant assassin which is traditionally worn with sad dignity, and which generally means ‘sorry, mate, I don’t want to do this – but c’est la vie’.

The screenwriter and director Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby, Casino Royal, Quantum of Solace) made a film about a domestic hero who is pushed out of his comfort zone in a struggle to protect his family from the all-seeing, all-controlling agents of the State. The rather short premise shows John Brennan, a community teacher from Pittsburgh (a working class town), leading a happy family life until the police come to his house and arrest his wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) for the murder of her female boss. As there is no legal way for Lara to get reunited with her husband and seven-year-old son during the next twenty years or so, John forges a reckless plan of getting her out of the high-security prison an escape from which is most likely to end in both of them being killed by the security guards. He only has three days to realise his plan.

Like this, Haggis introduces into the film an oxymoron which he would then peddle at every opportunity: John is a philosophy teacher, yet he is also a ruthless criminal. Not that the two concepts are completely incompatible, but teachers are traditionally seen as well behaved people – well-behaved being a euphemism for boring, of course. The hero wearing blue sweaters and jean shirts (hiding his rather expanded waistline), and looking more suitable in a domestic context, is compelled by love and the State to descend to the criminal underworld and break all imaginable social and ethical rules: he cracks locks, forges documents, kills people, burns down houses and leaves corpses in the street. He interviews seasoned criminals and gets beaten by traffickers and drug dealers. Decent men in the street look at his scratched muzzle in horror and disapproval. His parents are wondering what is eating at their formerly well-behaved son-pedagogue. ‘What kind of a criminal drives a Prius?’ – one of the amazed detectives asks his colleague, creating an almost acceptable product placement joke.

John truly reaches the bottom of society, yet, magically, manages to keep intact the line that separates the ‘clean’, warm family nest from the ugly, bloody hell of the criminal underworld. John is a loving father and a dutiful son. He is attentive to the little boy and regularly visits his parents. The master of suspension, Haggis shows darkness and danger seep into the ‘cosy’ aspect of the protagonist’s life through the cracks he had caused by his criminal activities. The audience is constantly expecting for something bad to happen to the little boy whose safety is threatened both by the gangsters and the police. Camerawork is claustrophobic, paranoid; focalisation is multiple, implying that everyone is an enemy of everyone else. Strangers knock at doors late at night; people inside the house are peeping through windows or eye holes trying to make out who the visitor might be. No enclosure, be it a car or a house, is safe. Haggis is keen to show the fragile, easily crossable boundary between the house and the outside world, and the audience is left to hope that Russell Crowe’s stocky frame is big enough to block the entrance and prevent the bad things from entering the domestic ménage. Both visually and conceptually, the film explores liminal spaces as it foregrounds all kinds of borders, frontiers, crossings and edges; from porches and doors to the heavily demarcated and regulated prison and hospital environments. Throughout the film, John is constantly stopped, searched, given orders and commands. The world is at war; he has the dual task of preventing others from entering his territory while he infiltrates someone else’s domain.

As a writer, Haggis is (rather annoyingly for the viewer) not interested in the details of the murder, which is briefly presented by way of occasional flashbacks, but only in the mind of the man who is blindly, manically in love. So in love, in fact, that he refuses to believe his wife when she confesses to him that she, indeed, had murdered the boss. The character of Lara is left in the shade, purely a vehicle for inspiring the man to do heroic things. Neither her motifs nor her hysterical, aggressive behaviour are explored or clarified. Her saviour is not even interested in her true wishes, desires or motivations – he rescues her against her will and flies her and the boy to Caracas to start a new life. In a rather artificial finale, two police officers are shown to baffledly peer into the drain hole in the street in the hope to find a button from the coat of the woman murdered by Lara three years ago. The police have lost the fight with the underworld. The culprits have escaped down the drain.

A solid, if a little sparse prison break movie, The Next Three Days does not flaunt its social subtext yet it shows the System, represented by courts, prisons and the police, lose to the power of reckless, irrational love. The protagonist comes to the conclusion that ‘rational thought destroys the soul’, and that human beings should exist ‘purely in the reality of their own making’. This means rebelling against all impediments to human freedom – pushing away security guards and hospital staff, cutting phone lines and hijacking trains and cars. It also means crossing the border into another, presumably unsafe country. Unsafe as it is, however, the foreign country is nevertheless the perfect place for the family of outlaws who refuse to obey the rules of a civilised society.