‘Soul’ has tuneful appeal – just don’t think about the plot
In the tradition of “Inside Out,” which also left me feeling like the only one not in on the joke, comes “Soul,” the latest effort from Disney-owned Pixar. The computer-animated film co-directed and co-written by “Inside Out” auteur Pete Docter, along with Kemp Powers, tells the story of Joe Gardner (Jamie Foxx), a New York City jazz musician and middle school music teacher, who on the eve of his biggest break after an audition at Manhattan’s legendary Half Note Club has an accident that separates his soul from his body, sending it to the Great Beyond. What a world.
But Joe, unlike everyone else in human history, refuses to give up on life, escapes and gets from the Great Beyond to the Great Before, where he meets a feisty new soul named 22 (Tina Fey), who resembles a small smurf, and tries to get back to the living before his body “dies.”
If any of this sounds the least bit ridiculous, you are not the audience for this film.
Neither am I. If a film crosses over into the Land of the Too Far-Fetched with no overriding reason to give it the benefit of the doubt, I’m out.
So, Joe is just close enough to dead to be in the Great Beyond? OK. But why does a new soul speak in the voice of SNL veteran Fey? A portal sends new souls to Earth after they have developed personalities?
Foxx earned an Academy Award for playing one of the most important musicians in American history, and he has a voice we like, and we believe he is a musician. Joe, who has slightly caricatured features, and wears a hat and shades when he’s alive, talks in the language of music. He gets, we are told, “lost in the music.” In the afterlife, he looks more like a cartoon. His loving mother (Phylicia Rashad) is a dressmaker. Joe gets a chance to play with jazz legend Dorothea Williams (Angela Bassett). His drummer friend Curley (Questlove, who is also a drummer) got him the lifealtering audition. But his accident intercedes.
“Soul counselors,” a twee concept to be sure, exist in the Great Before and are voiced by the appealing Richard Ayoade, the great Wes Studi and comedian Emily Fortune Feimster. But I didn’t buy that nonsense either. There is a stairway to heaven after all. It’s nice that Pixar has tried to diversify and created a tale with a mostly African American cast.
While Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross score the afterlife, Jon Batiste provides the jazzy sounds of the city. But why do the human characters in the Afterlife have only four fingers. Yes, I know all the characters in the film are animated. But
living ones have five fingers in the film. Wouldn’t losing a finger freak out a pianist? If you are asking yourself these questions, you aren’t enjoying “Soul” the way its creators intended. I wasn’t. (“Soul” contains mature themes and some off-color language.)