Review: Corpse Bride

The Bottom of the Bag:

A beautifully polished bunch of kernels. It's a shame most of them didn't pop.

I'm a longtime fan of Tim Burton's work. From the steely realism he brought to Batman, to the surreal charm of Edward Scissorhands, his artistic flair has an odd blend of lighthearted creepiness that's always had a certain appeal to me. His musical masterpiece, The Nightmare Before Christmas, has a particularly special place in my heart. He somehow managed to pull off the creation of a fantasy world entirely devoted to a single holiday, populated by dancing skeletons, a melancholic zombie, and a bad-ass Santa Claus. In clay. Put to music. Without seeming ridiculous. It was utterly unique, and with Burton I've come to expect something a little different.

Perhaps that's why I found Corpse Bride somewhat dissapointing. In some ways, it feels like it's riding on the success of its predecessor. I want to love this film, but whenever I try to analyze it, the words that keep coming to mind are 'half-realized'. Much like the film's titular character, Corpse Bride is dressed up nicely and has enough flesh to remain generally pleasing, but the portions of exposed skeleton are simply impossible to ignore.

Visually, the film is absolutely beautiful. I'm floored by what Burton's team was able to do with clay and stop motion photography. How do you make a tattered wedding dress flutter properly in the breeze with that kind of medium? The 19th century architecture and detailed scenery paint an excellent setting, and everything is suitably dark and bluishly gloomy while somehow remaining perfectly lit. Typically Burtonesque, one might say, but for me it never gets old. The range of emotion capable of being displayed by the characters is even more impressive, so much so that I have to suspect a certain amount of computer animation. The film is definitely worth a view even just to enjoy the sights.

Now for the criticism. It's not so much that this film suffers from an identity crisis, as that it isn't given enough time to adequately flesh out the different parts of its psyche. Is it a character driven romantic comedy? It seems to start out as such, and the first 30 minutes are quite strong in setting up what could be an interesting plot. We’re given a love triangle, questionable motives, a nefarious character, and in general the beginnings of a very promising story. Unfortunately, we never get much farther than this. The love triangle falls a little flat, as I never get enough of a feel for the characters’ motivations and desires that I’m able to pick a couple to root for. Depp’s character seems more lost than anything, but that’s alright because love triangle stories are rarely about the man. The women, however, don’t get much more treatment. The Bride herself, while potentially the most complex character, is so vacuous and one dimensional for most of the movie that it’s hard to connect with her. The other female lead is largely powerless and granted so little screen time that at points you almost forget she’s part of the story.

There’s also the sub-plot of a murder mystery, but the villain is so painfully obvious from the get-go that there’s no joy in the ‘revelation’ of his nefarious intent and history. To be fair, he does succeed as an adequately despicable character who deserves his comeuppance. Building the kind of character you love to hate is a difficult and admirable task. This one’s final speech is so unabashedly and heartlessly cruel that I personally couldn’t wait for his imminent punishment, in this case made all the sweeter by the fact that everyone knows it’s coming.

By the time the movie has reached the last 30 minutes or so, it seems to suddenly realize that it must now resolve a satisfyingly complex plot in an unsatisfactorily short amount of time. The solution? Deus ex machina! A vital bit of plot information is introduced at a critical moment, meanwhile the Bride spontaneously grows both a conscience and a clue. While I won’t spoil the final scene, suffice it to say that it resolves her situation a little too easily, and in a way that feels like cheating. I have no problem with suspension of disbelief, but a story should either follow its own rules, or have none at all. No part of the film had even once hinted that such a thing was possible, nor given me reason to understand why it should happen to the Bride and no one else.

Perhaps then, if it fails as drama it can succeed as a musical? Certainly a thin plot can be excused when it’s used as a vessel for some other kind of artistic expression. Well, Corpse Bride does contain a few musical numbers, but while they're certainly passable, I wouldn’t call them great. In what's otherwise a mostly dialogue heavy movie, the songs feel somewhat forced. It’s as if the director were given a minimum number of songs he had to shoehorn into the film, and so wedged them into any available crack in the plot when ordinary dialog would have sufficed perfectly. In fact, at one point, when the film uses a musical number to describe perhaps the most important plot detail of the movie, I felt that dialog would have worked far better.

Was the film enjoyable? Sure. Despite my criticisms, there’s lots I did like about Corpse Bride and I would recommend it to many people looking for a bit of light entertainment. I suppose I’m being a little hard on this movie precisely because it had so much potential. All the ingredients are here: a great concept, potentially complex characters, and actors who can deliver dialog and even carry a decent tune in spite of mediocre composition. I wouldn’t have taken the time to analyze what was wrong in such detail, if I didn’t see so much that could have been right.