Dustin Hoffman dusts off his performance from
Rain Man , sticks his finger in a socket to electrify his hair and tries to be the Willy Wonka of the toy world. Hoffman plays Mr. Magorium like a 243-year-old eccentric idiot savant who owns what were told is the most fantastic, most magical, most wonderful toy store in the world. This is a place where toys magically pop out of a book, stuffed animals magically come to life, and a room magically changes depending on what the dial is set to (I think this was stolen from
Howl's Moving Castle ). If you think I'm overusing the word "magical," thats nothing compared to how many times were told how magical the whole experience is. Anyway, Mr. Magorium decides that since his last pair of shoes are wearing out it's time for him to check out and leave the planet. So he bequeaths his store to the lovely but insecure Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman). Providing support is little Eric (Zach Mills), a hat collector, and providing skepticism is Henry (Jason Bateman), an accountant they all refer to as the Mutant. Once all the characters are introduced you can pretty much figure out everything that's going to happen. Unfortunately the film takes what seems like an eternity to get where we all know it's going.
Zach Mills in Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (Fox-Walden)
The poster says, You have to see it to believe it. And thats true. You have to see this bloated, bland and leaden film because it's hard to believe anybody greenlighting the project. With the exception of the charming, low-key performance of Zach Mills, nothing in this film works. A film about joy and wonder shouldn't have to work so hard to try and achieve those traits; it kind of defeats the purpose. Even the opening credits, with all their "cute" and forced cleverness come across as heavy handed attempts at fun. This film calls to mind the horrendous Toys although it aspires to the fun and delight of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory .
Writer-director Zach Helm (who also wrote Stranger Than Fiction ) has Eric narrate the story and we are constantly being told how eccentric Mr. Magorium is and how bizarre and wondrous this tale we're hearing is. The film feels like it should have been a children's book but the truth is that Helm created the story for the screen. But perhaps if someone with the truly magical skills of a Roald Dahl had written a children's book about Mr. Magorium then this film might have been better. But for a film to work, it needs to show us more than it tells us, and Helm never achieves the proper balance between these two. He was more successful in his script for Stranger Than Fiction in creating a world where unexpected things can happen.
Mr. Magoriums Wonder Emporium (rated G) is a painfully bad example of family entertainment. Even the smallest child in the audience knew that the key to making everything work is to simply believe in magic. Didn't Disney's Peter Pan teach everyone that decades ago? Movies by their very nature are magical and an inspired filmmaker can create magic from practically nothing. I remember a scene from the French film L'Atalante , in which a character runs his finger over the grooves of a record and we hear music play, when he lifts his finger the music stops. The beauty of the scene is that the character's initial response to the music playing from his finger is not one of surprise. Because he accepts the action as real so too does the audience, we accept the impossible as possible (of course we discover that it was indeed a trick). If Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium stopped telling us how magical and eccentric and fun it is then maybe it could have actually tried to be all those things. When the film was over I was shocked to discover that the running time was just over 90 minutes, the film felt more like three hours.
Companion viewing: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Amelie, Howl's Moving Castle, Mary Poppins
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