‘Addams Family’ suffers brainpower outage
One of the coolest scenes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest” is when Cary Grant approaches his perceived villains James Mason, Eva Marie Saint and Martin Landau sitting together at an art auction.
“Now that’s a picture only Charles Addams could draw,” he says.
It was a sneering witticism everyone understood in 1959. As a onepanel comic strip in the New Yorker magazine, “The Addams Family” was a sneakily sophisticated dig at societal conventions, upper class eccentricities and, of course, family values. Hitchcock was friends with Addams, who selfpromoted his
eccentricities just as Hitchcock did on his TV show.
So even through its various media incarnations, from a campy 1960s TV series to a couple of very good movies by Barry Sonnenfeld, “The Addams Family” is really adult humor.
In the new animated “The Addams Family,” it’s dumbed down for kids. Charles Addams should be rolling in his grave right now. (That’s not a good thing, in case you were wondering.)
You would think an animated film, especially in today’s shortattention span world, would be more outrageous than any liveaction incarnation. In other words, truer to Addams’ original vision.
But what’s surprising is how lowenergy this version is. Charlize Theron’s voice performance as Morticia Addams is practically spoken in a monotone, and isn’t near the fun that Anjelica Huston’s performance as Morticia was in the 1990s liveaction films. Likewise, Chloë Grace Moretz (as daughter Wednesday Addams) is no Christina Ricci, although Moretz’s Wednesday has a great scene straight out of the 1931 “Frankenstein.”
Only Oscar Isaac as patriarch Gomez Addams provides consistent sparkle with some wonderfully delicious line readings.
But what really sinks the film is the nitwit plot, which goes something like this: The Addamses have recently occupied an abandoned spooky mansion that sits on a hill overlooking the town of Assimilation (get it?). The town is home base for a national reality television series in which a caricatured Stepford wife, Margaux Needler (Allison Janney), does home makeovers: She turns every home in Assimilation into a bland, ordinary house.
She also has this weird, illegal habit, and who knows what the screenwriters were thinking here: Margaux has secretly installed hidden cameras into houses she makes over, watches her neighbors and tries to control them through social media.
Obviously, Margaux sees a threat in the Addamses — they’re not bland, they don’t fit in and she can’t control them — so she hatches a plot to make over their home as a ratingsgrabbing season finale.
Meanwhile, the Addams children have their own problems. Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard) is studying for a family ritual that would mark his passage from childhood to adulthood (although he looks about 8), but wants to do it in his own, destructive way. Wednesday wants to go to junior high school in Assimilation because she has struck up an unlikely friendship with Margaux’s daughter Parker (Elsie Fisher).
Her mother objects, to which Wednesday acidly replies, “You mean you want to deny me the opportunity to torment children my own age?”
Yes, there are funny lines, but nearly all of them are familiar to fans; it’s almost like a greatest hits of “Addams Family” quotables.
“Are you unhappy, darling?” Gomez asks Morticia.
“Yes,” she purrs, “Compleeetely.”
Same.