Inkheart
As the hero of "Inkheart," Brendan Fraser possesses what, in the movies lately, passes for a superpower: He can read. And when he does so aloud, the details and characters of any story can come to life.
"Inkheart" presents that gift as a curse. Fraser's character, Mo Folchart, a bookbinder, spends the film trying to find a rare copy of a fantasy that shares its title with the movie's. It seems that when his teenage daughter, Maggie (Eliza Hope Bennett), was a baby, Mo read the book's villains off its pages and read his wife onto them. He also read its protagonist, Dustfinger (Paul Bettany), out too. Dustfinger hounds Mo to read him back to his fictional world. Mo, meanwhile, just wants a reunion with his wife.
I wish I could report that the adventure awaiting all parties involved, including paying customers, is something to see. In fact, it's hard to fathom (why doesn't Mo just order a copy from Alibris.com?) and tougher to follow. Where on earth are we, exactly? A trip to Italy does turn up Helen Mirren in high spirits and higher turban, as Mo's aunt. But most of the time it looks like we're on the back lot for a Romanian production of "Lord of the Rings IV."
Andy Serkis, who so memorably lent his voice and likeness to Gollum, in the "Rings" movies, is more human here, sniveling through his part as the movie's chief baddie. Never mind that he is dressed like a starlet's bodyguard. He's having a good time. So is Jim Broadbent as the book's author. It takes him, his beret, and his giant pink scarf far too long to start sashaying through the dreary sets and narrative mud.
Broadbent and Mirren are the only actors who appear to appreciate the shabbiness of the shenanigans afoot. The rest of the cast is saddled with bad clothes, useless flashbacks (some of which have Bettany's actual wife, Jennifer Connelly, mewling across time, "Come home"), and worse wigs. The only exciting set piece is from the effects department, and it's a giant charcoal cloud that appears during the film's climax and requires Maggie to do public reading (alas, she's inherited her father's gift).
That sequence takes forever to get off the ground and longer to end. Like many other scenes in "Inkheart," which the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire adapted from Cornelia Funke's novel, it draws the most evocative images from other material, namely L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz." Toto and the twister make pivotal cameos. So does a copy of Jean Giraudoux's "The Madwoman of Chaillot," which the filmmakers use as a pun that goes nowhere.
How disappointing that a movie about the powers of literacy has been made by people who appear to be cinematically illiterate. Most scenes sit on the screen like bullfrogs waiting for something to happen. (Fittingly enough, when something does, it's usually a belch.) The director Iain Softley once made a ravishing, underappreciated version of Henry James's "The Wings of the Dove." He couldn't be farther from the beauty, heat, and perception of that film.
"Inkheart" illustrates an obvious problem with making a movie about the joys of reading when the movie made is labored and sludgy looking: Why bother seeing it if you can stay home and read a book instead?
Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.
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