Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past, but I’ll be damned if I can work out which is which. That is the upshot of “Tomorrowland,” the new film from Brad Bird, which starts with Frank Walker (George Clooney) revealing that “when I was a kid the future was different.” We then loop back to that kidhood, and to the eager young Frank (Thomas Robinson) attending the New York World’s Fair, in 1964, and lugging along a homemade jet pack—basically, a modified vacuum cleaner with straps. He enters an inventors’ contest, where the judge, a man named Nix (Hugh Laurie), looks at the jet pack and inquires, “How would it make the world a better place?” To which Frank replies, “Can’t it just be fun?”
Nix has a wise and smiling child with him, presumably his daughter. Her name, aptly, is Athena (Raffey Cassidy), and though not a functioning goddess, she has talents that prove, in the course of the film, to be more than human. One of these is the ability to ferry souls to Tomorrowland: a comely metropolis of sparkling towers and swooping pathways, cheerily buzzed by airborne vehicles and staffed by genial citizens drawn from every band of the racial rainbow. The kind of joint, in short, where a jet pack fits right in. You can get there in several ways, and Frank tries two of them. As a boy, at the World’s Fair, following Athena, he goes on a theme ride, aboard a little boat that tips him downward through a vortex—shades of Alice and her trip to Wonderland, in both the water and the fall. Later, as an adult, he uses a rocket that is cunningly concealed within the Eiffel Tower. The quickest route to Tomorrowland, however, comes at the touch of a button, or, to be exact, of a magic lapel badge. Graze it with your finger, and you find yourself amid a field of wheat, staring at the radiant city in the distance, much as Dorothy gazed at Oz. This is what happens to Casey (Britt Robertson), a high-school student in the present day. Her surname is Newton, and, in case we don’t get the point, we see her toss an apple through the air.
Casey lives in Florida, near a nasa launch site that is being demolished. The dismantling pains her so profoundly that she breaks in, by night, to sabotage it. On the strength of that resolve, she is recruited by none other than Athena, who shows up, wondrously unaged, and takes her to Frank, now holed up in a farmhouse. What has befallen him, in the intervening decades, we don’t discover, but he has aged, ungracefully so. Clooney is in full grumpy-shaggy mode—a look that we have seen before, in “Syriana,” but further rumpled here by a desperate paranoia. To be honest, he looks miserable throughout the film, as if badly wishing he were somewhere else. That glumness sits awkwardly in “Tomorrowland,” which strives against the fad for dystopian sagas—“The Hunger Games,” “Divergent,” and so forth—and bravely asks, Where did all the utopias go?
Brad Bird directed “The Incredibles” and “Ratatouille” before switching to live action, for “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol,” the larkiest of the sequels in that franchise. Eleven years old when men first landed on the moon, Bird belongs to the generation for whom the lunar module was the shape of things to come. That is why beautiful shapes infest his new film, the first half of which pops and whizzes with everything he does best. One sequence after another is streamlined and clean-cut, and you sense that Bird has a genuine affection for gizmos, not just because they’re cool but because they clear a path through the obstacles of life—because, in short, they work. Look at Casey, sending a mini-drone over NASA’s fence to mess with the security cameras; or the fiercely barking hologram that guards Frank’s house; or the bathtub that doubles as an escape pod, hurtling skyward when he wants to get out in a rush.
Even gizmos, however, need to lead somewhere, and although “Tomorrowland” never runs out of objects or ideas, its supply of dramatic fuel soon springs a leak. Bird co-wrote the film with Damon Lindelof, who, as addled viewers of “Lost,” “Prometheus,” and “World War Z” can attest, is more concerned with setups than with payoffs. We get a flurry of chase sequences, and a crunchy final showdown, but you feel weirdly unbothered by the result. The only thing at stake appears to be the survival of the planet, and that’s always a cop-out. Give me “The Incredibles” any day, with a single family to root for, and a single baddie to boo. The hitch, in the new film, is that Tomorrowland itself is so fuzzily defined: Is it a real destination? Is it a state of mind? No, it’s a superconcept! (It’s also, of course, a zone that you can visit at Disneyland, and “Tomorrowland” is a loyal Disney production.) Toward the end, it falls to Hugh Laurie to keep a heroically straight face as he inveighs against the people of Earth: “They didn’t fear their demise. They repackaged it.” Lord, what fools these mortals be! Thank heavens for Disney, which is here to warn us against repackaging. Other evils, the film suggests, include civil strife and climate-change denial, but our fragile race may yet be saved, apparently, by wind farms, busking guitarists, and paying attention in school. “Tomorrowland” is a bright and pliable sci-fi thriller that stiffens into a sermon. Can’t it just be fun?
There is little shame, and less surprise, in the fact that filmmakers have stumbled in their effort to bring the work of Flaubert to the screen. Even those of the first rank, like Jean Renoir and Claude Chabrol, have fallen short. One obstacle is the author’s compositional mania, which led him to cherish his commas in the way that ordinary people love their children. How easily that suppleness of sound, patterned on the page, can clog into visual fuss. Then there’s the herd of largely uninteresting, often unlikable folk whose fortunes we track in “Madame Bovary,” and who would be alarmed to learn that they were the raw material of a masterpiece. No one wants to be the victim of a plot. How do you dramatize dullards, weaklings, and nincompoops and not wind up with a movie theatre full of gentle snoring?
The latest director to make the attempt is Anne Fontaine, who approaches the problem sideways. “Gemma Bovery” is an adaptation not of Flaubert but of a graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, which toys with an unlikely resurrection of the story in the modern age. An English couple, Charlie Bovery (Jason Flemyng) and his wife, Gemma (Gemma Arterton), move to a delightful, damp, and mouse-ridden house in a small Normandy town. Their arrival is noted by Joubert (Fabrice Luchini), the local baker, who lives across the street. He is a rabid Flaubertian, and can scarcely believe that his treasured book is being staged anew, as it were, before his eyes. He dotes on Gemma, corrects her French, and schools her in the kneading of dough (“my yoga,” he calls it), although his ogling seems paltry when compared to that of the camera, which carries out regular inspections of Arterton’s nape and breasts, in a succession of summer frocks. Her character is vapid enough, as the novel demands, but anyone who hoped that Fontaine might unpick, rather than fortify, the male gaze is in for a letdown. Contrast the boldness with which Renoir, in his movie of 1934, made Emma somewhat older and plainer than custom dictates, and thereby made us reflect on the eyes of her beholders, and on how provincial myopia can skew the moral vision.
As Gemma goes through the motions of her fictional counterpart—boffing a blue blood in his faded château, hatching an appointment in Rouen Cathedral, and so on—we are offered a handful of sketchy observations on the extent to which art either does or does not mimic life. These are, at best, unchallenging, and would have drawn barks of laughter from the derisive Flaubert. The only performer who seems at ease is Luchini, eternally hangdog, who in one juicy moment spies Gemma and her beau-to-be, at a market stall, and confesses not to envy but to “a strange kind of jubilation” at seeing Flaubert’s narrative lock into place. Such glee, however, pales beside the delicate daring of François Ozon’s “In the House” (2012), a study of similar fixations, with Luchini as a literature teacher at the Lycée Gustave Flaubert. And that, in turn, is no match for “The Kugelmass Episode,” written by Woody Allen for this magazine, in 1977, which transports a balding, henpecked humanities professor into the midst of “Madame Bovary”:
As for the ensuing scenes, which spring Emma forward through time into a suite at the Plaza, where she racks up room service and complains, yet again, of being bored (“Watching TV all day is the pits”)—well, read the tale for yourself. Just once, for a few delirious pages, Flaubert got what he deserved. ♦
