Chattanooga Times Free Press - ChattanoogaNow
‘Addams Family’ reboot maintains spooky charm, but doesn’t break the mold
‘The Addams Family’
› Rating: PG for macabre and suggestive humor
› Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes
The enduring appeal of “The Addams Family” is quite impressive. With only four notes and a couple of snaps, plus a classic black dress, one can instantly evoke the classic American Gothic clan, who are creepy, kooky, mysterious and spooky.
Since Morticia’s 1938 debut in The New Yorker cartoon drawn by Charles Addams, the unusual family has been iconic in every possible format: a 1960s TV series, two animated series, two wildly popular 1990s feature films, a Broadway musical, video games and now, an animated feature directed by Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon, written by Matt Lieberman, Pamela Pettler and Erica Rivinoja.
Former New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff said in a 2010 interview that Addams’ work “delighted in turning upside down our assumptions about normality and its relationship to good and evil.” That is the underlying thesis of “The Addams Family,” which isn’t a new take so much as a deeply faithful rendering of Addams’ cartoons, in style and content. The animated figures hew closely to Addams’ cartoons, imparted in the dry, deadpan, punny wordplay integral to the Addams appeal.
This is all par for the Addams course, so what new territory can be wrought here? There are some supernatural liberties that can be taken, for sure, in this computer animated format, but the core beliefs are in place. The Addamses might look, talk and act darker and weirder than most, but what makes them the weirdest is they’re a loving, tight-knit family (with both parents alive, it should be noted). Oscar Isaac’s Gomez is smitten with his wasp-waisted wife, Morticia (Charlize Theron), and both are invested for their children, Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard), and their extended families.
There are some good gags about Wednesday’s unique methods of rebellion, and Nick Kroll brings an inspired vocal performance to Uncle Fester.
But the real inventiveness of the film lies in its villain, a perfectly perky home and garden TV host, Margaux (Allison Janney), who has set her sights (and profit margins) on gentrifying the Addams’ neck of New Jersey. She’s built a new suburban development called “Assimilation” in the foothills underneath the Addams’ abandoned insane asylum-turned-mansion and intends to sell all the homes while achieving massive TV ratings success.
With her blonde bouffant, Margaux is somewhat of a riff on Joan Cusack’s psychotic interloper Debbie, the villain from “Addams Family Values.” But Margaux is hilariously topical, as she whips up a frenzied pastel mob wielding digital torches on the internet forum Neighborhood Peeps. The question comes down to: Just who is normal anyway?
No one, really, and that’s always been the appeal of “The Addams Family” over its many decades, allowing an outlet for our collective dark side and finding the humor in all things macabre.