Thursday, November 23, 2017

Catching Up: "Colossal"

  

With her bushy hair, long bangs, enormous eyes and too-wide smile, Anne Hathaway seems perpetually to be apologizing and in a mild state of distress, which has always served her harried comic characters well, and does so again in Colossal.

Gloria is a screw-up of, well, colossal proportions, far too old for the drunken shenanigans she pulls, far too self-absorbed to be aware of them, and so far past the point of help that she can't see that the handsome man (Dan Stevens) she lives with is a controlling bully. When it comes to her drinking and her lying, though, we sense his anger may have a point, but he's another in a long line of mistakes Gloria has made. When he finally kicks her out of the New York City apartment they share, she retreats to her now-empty childhood home.

She hasn't been back in town a day when she runs into her childhood sweetheart, the sweet-talking, aw-shucks opposite of the man who dumped her.  Oscar (Jason Sudeikis) also happens to own the town's only bar, and decides that alcoholic, desperate Gloria would make a perfect waitress, and his best friends Joel (Austin Stowell) and Garth (Tim Blake Nelson) agree.

But there's a monster lurking in this charming rom-com setup -- Gloria is a full-scale alcoholic who can't accept responsibility for her behavior. And, oddly, the sweet and handsome Oscar thinks that hiring a known drunk is a good idea. He seems like a nice guy, but a nice guy wouldn't do that.  It's not long before the monster finally rears its ugly head, and in a most unexpected way.

Waking up from a drunken stupor, Gloria is shocked to hear that clear on the other side of the world, a giant, Godzilla-like monster is rampaging its way through Seoul, South Korea.  The monster is an oddity, but the damage it inflicts is real: people have died and parts of the city have been leveled.  Think back to 9/11.  A lot of people felt a strange sense of responsibility and personal investment into a disaster that was happening somewhere else. It's the same way for Gloria. She hears the news and the level of anxiety she feels seems out of proportion, but maybe it's just a human response.

Or, maybe not.

Gloria begins to suspect that maybe she is somehow responsible for this inexplicable turn of world history.  And, in fact, she is.

Gloria controls the monster.  And if that sounds like a metaphor, guess what?  Are you saying Frankenstein and the Wolfman aren't metaphors, too?  That the aliens Ripley faced weren't symbolic?  Gloria's monster may not be of her own making, but what's happening in Seoul is certainly her doing.  Her discovery of her rampaging superpower takes place during Colossal's relatively lighthearted first half -- as lighthearted as you can get with a borderline sociopathic alcoholic and the deaths of hundreds of people.

But Colossal manages a jaunty tone, and before long Gloria is sharing her revelation with Joel, Garth and Oscar -- who, it turns out, is a considerably accomplished alcoholic himself.

Gloria learns the secrets of when the monster appears and how, standing on playground in her little New England town, whatever she does the monster does, too.  Now Gloria, while deeply troubled and emotionally scarred, is not a bad person, so she learns to control her monster, and pretty soon the people of Seoul are enjoying the monster's funny hand gestures and silly little dances, along with a poetic apology -- the kind of apology the drunk leaves her husband on the dining table after she's done something awful.

But it's still a monster.  And the people Gloria has shared her secret with aren't really the most trustworthy and empathetic sort, and one of them even has a monster of his own.  This is where Colossal gets really interesting.

The script by director Nacho Vigalondo revels in the obviousness of its metaphors -- and in using them to explore a story that otherwise might be too painful to watch.  As Gloria realizes just what she and her fifty-story-tall giant monster avatar can do (most of the time, she watches it on TV), she grasps the complexity of the problem and, in a pretty terrific female-centric plot, realizes the men aren't going to be any help -- she's got to figure this out on her own.

Gloria's monster bestows upon her a power that is both frighteningly overwhelming and intensely self-empowering, and it's the latter realization that sees the film through to its unusually satisfying climax.

Colossus happens to come along at a time when women are finding their own inner giant robots and finally taking a stand against the unrelievedly lousy way they've been silenced, and though Colossus was made long before the latest revelations of sexual harassment and molestation came to light, it couldn't be better timed.  But it's not purely a story of feminine self-awareness -- Colossus works so well for the way Gloria's increasing awareness of her own power could relate to anyone who's trying to become someone other than who they are.

Yet, Colossus doesn't shy away from some pretty pointed, angry observations about men in general.  The one who seems best suited to her is meek and demure, he boyfriend is angry and controlling, while the nicest of all possible guys, Sudeikis's Oscar, turns out to be quite a monster himself. Sudeikis plays against his nice-guy image to uncover some grotesque anger, and doesn't shy away from Oscar's increasingly unsavory side, while Hathaway brings a giddiness to her character's growing determination to change.

Yet, this is above all a screen fantasy, and genre fans won't leave disappointed: there is a monster-on-monster smackdown that overcomes its lower-budget effects to be every bit as worthwhile as something in a Marvel film -- maybe even more, because the giant creatures mean something more than their digital bits.

Overlooked on its initial release, Colossal is available now on streaming services including Hulu, and to miss it this time around would be a Colossal mistake.



Viewed 11/22/27 -- Hulu


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