'Political Dr. Seuss' is all reason, no rhyme

There's no surer way to kill a joke than to explain it, and there's no better way to suck the life out of a whimsical, elegant body of work than to show how important it really is. Straightforward, workmanlike, interesting, and dull, "The Political Dr. Seuss" assures us everything Theodor Seuss Geisel did was serious at heart. Any child could tell you that.

Still, Robert Lamothe's film is one step closer to the major biography this artist deserves, and if you have any interest in children's literature, 20th-century graphic narrative, or great American eccentrics, "Seuss" is worth catching either at the MFA or when it airs on WGBH's "Independent Lens" series beginning Oct. 27. But its insistence that "most surprising of all, Dr. Seuss was political" is awfully disingenuous.

Following the A&E "Biography" template, the film trails its subject from youth in Springfield, where he came from a family of German-American brewers, to Dartmouth College, where Geisel partied, wrote for the college humor magazine, and discovered, as he put it later, that "words and pictures together might make a more interesting progeny than either parent."

For these sequences, Lamothe uses mostly black-and-white footage of 1920s student life and old-timey jazz on the soundtrack; we get city-crowd montages when Geisel journeys to New York to make it as an illustrator. You need a deft hand to make this sort of dive into the stock-film bin inspiring, and the filmmaker doesn't have it. Similarly, the use of scenes from dated kiddie-animation versions of Seuss classics from the 1970s and '80s feels like padding. But you works with what you gots.

The meat of "The Political Dr. Seuss" comes during the World War II era, when Geisel -- by then a successful commercial illustrator and children's book author who had already taken on his famous pen name -- was moved by outrage at American isolationism to start drawing political cartoons. He was hired by "PM," the now-forgotten liberal daily newspaper, and cranked out 400 cartoons in two years. They are, in the words of one interviewee, "brash, often schoolboyish, and angry."

Hitler and Mussolini came in for regular bashing, as did US fascists and "America First"-ers; you get a sense of Seuss's gleeful unsubtlety in a cartoon of Charles Lindbergh wearing a gas mask while he shovels glop from a wagon labeled "Nazi Anti-Semite Stink Wagon." He also came down hard on the Japanese with breathtaking buck-toothed racism, and it's amusing to watch Lamothe's film twist itself into PC pretzels to address this.

Nor was cartooning all Geisel did during the war: Joining Frank Capra's armed forces filmmaking unit at "Fort Fox" in Hollywood, the artist worked with Warner Brothers animation great Chuck Jones on a series of ribald, funny "Private Snafu" cartoons for GIs. He also wrote and directed two propaganda documentaries to be shown to postwar occupation troops. This is fascinating stuff, but Lamothe gives it superficial treatment, suggesting that Seuss was the sole creative force behind the "Snafu" cartoons (hint: Jones was an authentic American genius, too) and barely touching on how Geisel's own conflicts over his German heritage might have contributed to the hostile tone of the "Your Job in Germany" film.

"The Political Dr. Seuss" goes on to discuss how Yertle the Turtle was modeled on Adolf Hitler (although showing the original drawings of Yertle with a Hitler moustache might have been nice) and underlines the allegorical nature of many of Geisel's books. Again, this is hardly news to anyone who has read about the North-Going Zax and the South-Going Zax.

More interesting is the interview with the artist's second wife and widow, Audrey Geisel, whose management of his estate has led to two spectacularly un-Seussian Hollywood movies, among other missteps, and who does herself no favors with her comments here. (She boasts about giving the aging Geisel a makeover and assuring him that later books like "The Lorax" and "The Butter Battle Book" weren't too preachy when in fact they were.)

Ted Geisel was by all accounts a hard man to know -- described as "a personable zealot," he was also a reticent public figure who seems to have distrusted everything but the work itself. And for good reason: The delightful, subversive power of his books is right there on the page, and it vanishes the moment you try to film it, or animate it, or even explicate it. This is called art, and it's a subject to which "The Political Dr. Seuss" never addresses itself.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.

The Political Dr. Seuss
Written and directed by: Robert Lamothe. At: Museum of Fine Arts, tonight and Sunday
Running time: 84 minutes
Unrated
**1/2