Popeye

Perhaps if I had grown up watching this movie as a child, I would have become part of the large cult demanding that this movie be placed within the pantheon of great films from Robert Altman. It doesn’t belong there, hell, it doesn’t even really belong in his second-tier of films. Yet there’s still something enchanting about its ambitious nature despite its repeated failures to even out in tone.

Much of the minor successes of the film belong to the ingenious, frequently obvious, choices in casting. Robin Williams playing a live-action cartoon character? That seems like a no brainer decision, even for Williams’ first film role. And he gives his Julliard-trained best to animating a live action Popeye, perfectly mimicking the muffled, teeth-gritted speech patterns and hunched, propulsive way of walking. Shelley Duvall, Paul Dooley, Paul L. Smith all feel like the cartoon creations brought into the real world. Duvall’s big saucer eyes and nervous energy in particular are a perfect fit for the character.

And the entire production design, costumes, makeup, and cheesy practical effects are effortlessly charming. The main problem with Popeye is in the insistence that it be made into a musical, and a children’s film, neither of which are Altman’s strongest points of view as an artist. There isn’t a memorable musical number throughout the entire film, and many of these sequences lack energy or coherence. Altman’s over-lapping dialog works for his mass ensemble dramas, but not for a musical aimed at family audiences. What emerges is an awkward film, one that is by turns charming, sometimes deadly dull. It’s an odd marriage of Altman’s cynicism beating against the sunny shores of the Fleischer cartoons it owes its origins too (it bears little-to-no resemblance to the comic strips). But it is refreshing to see something darker, more ambitious than the normal Disney simplification of good-and-evil’s eternal struggle.