Dolittle

The Taxidermy of a Blockbuster

I am still trying to process the sheer, unfiltered strangeness of *Dolittle*. When an actor reaches the absolute apex of global stardom, the kind of Mount Olympus status Robert Downey Jr. enjoyed immediately following his decade-plus run as Iron Man, their first subsequent choice is usually a statement of intent. They might retreat to the theater, team up with an auteur, or make a quiet, challenging indie film. Downey chose a $175 million CGI-heavy family comedy where he voices a Victorian veterinarian who speaks to ducks. I still cannot quite wrap my head around it.

The bewilderment deepens when you look at who was placed at the helm. Stephen Gaghan is a filmmaker whose reputation was built on the dense, geopolitical grittiness of *Traffic* and *Syriana*. Handing him a slapstick comedy about a grieving man and his talking parrot is a choice so baffling it borders on the avant-garde. You can feel the studio panic radiating from the screen. The editing is frantic, constantly cutting away from natural human interaction to dub in one-liners from off-screen animals. It feels less directed than assembled out of sheer desperation.



Downey’s performance is a compelling object of study, mainly because it is so deeply isolated. He chose to base his character's voice on William Price, a 19th-century Welsh neo-Druid. The result is a breathy, high-pitched mumble that sounds like a man trying to share a secret in a loud restaurant. But it's his physicality that betrays the production's reality. Watch how he interacts with his menagerie. He rarely seems to be looking at the same spot the animators eventually placed the digital gorilla or the polar bear. His shoulders are rigid; his gaze wanders just a few inches to the left of where it should be. He's acting in a vacuum, completely disconnected from the digital world swirling around him.

And what a bizarre world it is. The plot ostensibly involves a quest to save a dying Queen Victoria by sailing to a mythical island for the fruit of the Eden Tree. But the narrative is simply a clothesline for a series of hyperactive set pieces that feel beamed in from entirely different movies. The ocean voyage feels like a theme park ride that keeps breaking down.



Which brings us to the climax. It is, without a doubt, one of the most astonishing things I have ever seen in a major studio release. Dolittle and his animal crew confront a fearsome, fire-breathing dragon. The beast is in agony. The doctor deduces that the creature is not angry; she's simply suffering from a severe intestinal blockage. Yes, really. Dolittle proceeds to perform a makeshift, on-screen colonoscopy on the dragon, pulling out a ridiculous assortment of swallowed armor, bones, and bagpipes as the beast groans in relief. IndieWire's David Ehrlich captured the sheer whiplash of the moment perfectly, noting that while he was not sure what he expected from the film, a climax featuring "a colonoscopy on a dragon certainly wasn’t it."

I honestly respect the audacity of that scene. In a film that feels focus-grouped to death, patched together by reshoots and ADR, that sequence is so profoundly weird that it briefly jolts the movie to life. It’s a glimpse of the unhinged, idiosyncratic disaster this could have been before it was sanded down for family consumption.



Most of the time, though, *Dolittle* is simply loud. It substitutes constant motion for pacing and volume for jokes. Michael Sheen pops up as a rival doctor, twitching and grimacing like a man trying to escape his own costume, while Antonio Banderas plays a pirate king with a gravity the film completely ignores. They are all trapped in a shiny, expensive diorama.

Maybe that's the real tragedy of *Dolittle*. Beneath the terrible Welsh accent and the frantic computer graphics, there is a tiny, fragile story about a man trying to overcome the paralyzing grief of losing his wife. Occasionally, in the quiet spaces between the shouting ducks and the flatulent dragons, you can nearly see Downey trying to find that emotional center. He reaches for it, but the machinery of the blockbuster simply drowns him out.