From kidnapped child to bunker fanboy to giant teddy bear
Brigsby Bear Director: Dave McCary Starring: Mark Hamill, Kyle Mooney, Claire Danes ★★★★✩
Brigsby Bear may lack the bluster and bombast of typical summer fare, but what it lacks in budget, it more than makes up for in charm – this is undoubtedly the quirkiest movie you’ll see this summer.
The story takes place in the previously unexplored crossover section between The Truman
Show and Room, but unlike the young protagonist in Room,
Kyle Mooney’s James Pope isn’t locked in a bunker with his mother, but by his mother (and father, played by Star Wars legend Mark Hamill), and unlike the protagonist in The Truman
Show, he isn’t the unwitting star of a made up TV show, but its biggest fan.
Pope, you see, has been locked underground by his “parents” since he was a baby, on the basis that a disaster has befallen humanity and the air outside their sanctuary is unbreathable. His sole interaction outside the subterranean threesome has been with a TV show, Brigsby
Bear Adventures. This features a giant talking bear, an evil sun, lots of lasers and saving the world, maths puzzles solved by a pair of twins, and cod philosophy on the importance of the family unit. It exists somewhere between Teddy Ruxpin, Teletubbies, cult propaganda and the height of ’60s psychedelia, and James is obsessed.
There’s just one problem – his “parents” are actually the couple who kidnapped him as a baby; there’s been no disaster; and Brigsby Bear Adventures is the creation of his toymaker “dad” to keep him occupied.
When James is rescued by the police and returns to his real family, he discovers there are no more episodes of Brigsby to watch in the outside world, and his life falls apart.
It would be easy to play the sheltered manchild of James’s exposure to real life for goofy laughs – indeed given Mooney’s pedigree as a writer and star of Saturday Night Live you’d perhaps expect it – but the comic gives a delightfully subtle performance, offering just the right amount of wide-eyed innocence and social awkwardness, without ever turning James into an object of fun.
As he learns to interact with the world and people around him, including Jorge Lendeborg Jr’s aspiring CGI artist Spencer, he learns that there are other TV shows and films out there, and that anyone can make them. Missing his childhood TV series and determined to bring closure to Brigsby Bear Adventures,
James and Spencer set out to make their own Brigsby movie.
It’s all light-hearted fare – even though the kidnapped child premise is grim, it’s clear James’s fake parents actually love him in their strange way – but the film also offers serious comment on a society obsessed by fanboy culture and nostalgia fetishism. The presence of Luke Skywalker, perhaps the ultimate symbol of fanboy obsession, as James’s fake father is a stroke of casting genius.
Brigsby Bear is in cinemas now