Dumbo ** (2019, Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Alan Arkin) – Movie Review

What a dull and uninspired film director Tim Burton’s part-live-action, part-CGI remake of the magical 1941 Disney cartoon Dumbo is! The rusty gears crank up, but it never takes flight. To be fair, Burton was always going to have an uphill struggle dragging this ancient material into the present-day cinema, though in his Beetlejuice and Mars Attacks! days he could have found the right touch.

Dumbo (2019) is beautifully crafted and lovingly made, and conscientiously acted, and has good retro and circus atmosphere, as well as a lovely score by Danny Elfman, but it lacks the fairy tale magic it was obviously going for. Burton tries to take it seriously and reverentially, and so it is not much fun at all. Couldn’t it have been kitsch and campy? Couldn’t there be lots of laughs? Couldn’t there be some jolly songs?

Top billed Colin Farrell is grave and sombre as ex circus star Holt Farrier who returns from the war minus an arm, Michael Keaton is silky smooth as the villainous silver-tongued entrepreneur V A Vandevere, Danny DeVito kids around as the circus owner Max Medici who gets Holt to take care of newborn elephant Dumbo, and Alan Arkin looks and sounds supercilious and sarcy as the entrepreneur J Griffin Remington.

Dumbo stars Eva Green.

All three of the venerable old comedy actors are fine but they do not seem quite at their best here, hardly fully engaged, though DeVito comes out best. Apart from the limited charms of the two CGI elephants (at least they don’t talk), this just leaves Nico Parker and Finley Hobbins as Holt’s over-earnest kids Milly and Joe Farrier, and Eva Green as the spectacular aerial artist Colette Marchant. Ms Green is the very personification of spectacular, one of the wonders of the world, and deserves her own movie. Maybe Burton will give her that one day.

Alas, it is not much of a story spread out over a slow-moving 112 minutes. It looks incredible costly – if looks were everything, this would be an instant classic – and it was incredible costly at $170 million. It seems bizarrely extravagant. Dumbo is so beautiful that it hurts, but it is not really a fortune well spent. It is much ado about nothing, or very little anyway.

If the film has heroes, they are surely the technicians at Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, England, and production designer Rick Heinrichs (apparently inspired by the paintings of artist Edward Hopper), as well as art directors Chris Lowe (supervising art director), Gregory Fangeaux (vfx art director),Andrew Bennett, Dean Clegg, Mark Harris, Oli van der Vijver and Loic Zimmermann (MPC). Congratulations to all of these industry stalwarts.

Nico Parker is an actress, known for Dumbo (2019).

It is Nico Parker’s acting debut. She is the youngest daughter of Thandie Newton and Ol Parker, and filmed her part while her mother finished Disney’s Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) on a nearby set in the UK. She looks very like her mother.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Movie Review

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