Review of Gnomeo & Juliet (2011) by Shiira — 15 Feb 2011

They look like toys, but they're not. It must really burn this sorry lot, to come up short against their rivals, and yet the filmmaker doesn't go there. "Gnomeo and Juliet" never gets past its initial conceit.

The film simply wants to goof on William Shakespeare. Too bad. The pathos goes unexplored. The gnomes are cute, distinguishable by sex, and their faces suggest a personality, but alas, the gnomes aren't kid-friendly.

The parts don't move. They don't make a sound. Worst of all, they're ceramic. Nobody plays with lawn ornaments. (Can you just imagine the people at Pixar exploiting this fact!!!) Nobody loves them. It's a reality that the makers of "Gnomeo and Juliet" never acknowledge, preferring instead to infuse the mindset of the lawn ornament with a toy's logic, a toy's undying loyalty.

The feuding gnomes, in actuality, have no surnames. As it's revealed in the opening shot, after the Andy Kaufman-esque prologue(similar in theme to his "Great Gatsby" bit), the Montagues and the Capulets are appellations that refer to the gnomes' human owners, next-door neighbors at odds who reside on Verona Drive.

Even though the gnomes wear the tribal colors of their respective landowners, blue(Montagues) and red(Capulets) shouldn't signify anything because the gnomes, by all appearances, are not on a first-name basis with the people, the warring factions whose problems they appropriated as their own.

To the actual Montagues and the actual Capulets, the auxiliary members of their families that occupy the gardens, are ciphers, so where does this loyalty come from, which inspires the gnomes to keep Gnomeo and Juliet from being together? Not once do we see, Montague or Capulet alike, performing some sort of ministration upon the gnomes to indicate that the lawn ornaments have value, akin to a toy.

For instance, when Tybult shatters and is reduced to tiny pieces, due to a lawnmower racing accident, a savvier film would have shown who(person or thing) was responsible for the gnome's eventual restoration.

More than likely, it's a lawn ornament who mends Tybult, but each group's allegiance to his namesake would lead you to believe that the glue belonged to a proper Capulet. If human hands put Tibult back together, you could understand better as to why the Red Hats and the Blue Hats can't mix.

But as "Gnomeo and Juliet" makes clear, the film has no Andy(the boy from the "Toy Story" series"), a human representative who interacts with inanimate objects, and loves them.

Clearly, these lawn ornaments are forgotten, and left to their own devices. Their real grudge should be with the toys, who sleep in the house, on a shelf or a bed, instead of having to brave the elements: the rain, the sleet, the snow, and the neighborhood cats, the neighborhood dogs.

Toys have value. Toys get fixed. In essence, "Gnomeo and Juliet" wants to be "Lawn Ornament Story", especially during the scene where the pink flamingo recounts the story of his pink flamingo mate, which contains the same "Toy Story" approach to loss, evoking the moment in the second film when Emily, Jessie the Cowgirl's owner, tosses the doll under the bed, and is forgotten.

"Gnomeo and Juliet" is equally adult in its handling of abandonment issues. Tossed into a garden shed, the aftermath of a separation between the flamingo's owners(she took the other bird), Featherstone muses, "Other people's hate destroyed my love" but the moviegoer never gets a read on how the pink bird feels about their indifference, the casual cruelty which led to his imprisonment in that shack.

In Lee Unkrich's '"Toy Story 3", Lots O'Huggin Bear couldn't survive without his human, so as a coping mechanism, he unleashes his anger upon Woody and Buzz Lightyear, and the rest of Andy's toys, because in the stuffed animal's state of bereftness, he despises the newly-arrived toys at the daycare for the same reason he despises himself: the bear needs his original owner, he needs love, whereas the gnomes need no human interaction, and yet, both sides are willing to fight in their honor.

Prior to the final action set-piece, just like how Shakespeare wrote it, Benny breaks into the Montague household, and using the computer, orders the lawnmower that will give the "blue hats" an advantage over the "red hats".

The Terra-firmanator, under his command, nearly kills the star-crossed lawn ornaments, and what for? Had Benny been successful, the old lady would have simply swept away the ceramic pieces into a dustpan, without ceremony.

If the makers of "Gnomeo and Juliet" had Pixar's ambition, they would have made Juliet a toy.