Individual expression, but in a dull storyline
There are about half-adozen bright spots in the new animated feature The Addams Family, but in between them is the unbright and unoriginal storyline about how the real monsters are the ordinary people, not the weird people.
Charles Addams began creating his deliciously macabre characters for one-panel New Yorker cartoons in 1938, but they didn’t get names and storylines until the 1960s television series, taking the last name from the cartoonist who created them.
What makes the Addams Family so appealing is the contrast between the ghoulish details of their lives and the endearing sweetness of their family dynamic. Father Gomez (here voiced by Oscar Isaac) and mother Morticia (Charlize Theron) adore each other and are loving and devoted parents to their daughter Wednesday (Chloe Grace Moretz) and son Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard). And their deep enjoyment of what otherwise might seem scary — having an escaped prisoner from the asylum for the criminally insane as a butler, a disembodied hand as an all-purpose helper, applying the ashes of dead parents as make-up, encouraging a child to play with explosives — makes it funny and even endearing instead.
In this modernised, animated version, we first see Morticia putting on that ashy make-up for what turns out to be her midnight wedding, interrupted by angry neighbours with torches and pitchforks who want all the people they consider weirdoes out of town. Gomez promises her they will find a home that “no one in their right mind would be caught dead in”. Fast forward to 13 years later, with tweens Wednesday and Pugsley happily creating mayhem, or happily unhappily, as Addams family members would never enjoy anything so cheery as happiness. Wednesday, whose long braids are tied up like nooses, asks if she can try going to the public school, where she makes a friend (“Eighth Grade’s” Elsie Fisher as Parker) and stands up to a mean girl. Parker’s mother, Margaux Needler (Allison Janney) is the star of a home makeover reality show and she is determined to sell the houses in the new Assimilation community where children sing,
“What’s so great about being yourself when you can be like everyone else? It’s easy to be happy if you have no choice.” Worried that the big, gloomy Addams mansion will affect sales and the ratings of her live special, she plans to give them a makeover, whether they want one or not. And she uses fake profiles on social media to spread lies that frighten the neighbours, just as the Addams relatives arrive for Pugsley’s coming-of-age ceremony. It looks like pitchforks and torches again.
Children will enjoy the upsidedown world — where dusting the house means making it dustier, and an invitation to the mall is heard as an invitation to a maul — but even children will understand that the theme of encouraging individual expression would be more compelling if the storyline wasn’t so resolutely dull.