Review of Gulliver's Travels (2010) by Shiira — 30 Dec 2010

Jack Black needs to graduate from the school of rock. He flunked "Margot at the Wedding" and barely passed "King Kong", but those are the sort of films he has to keep taking and master, varied roles in which the high-octane comic actor can't dial anything in, a challenge he first faced in the 2008 Noam Baumbach film, starring Nicole Kidman.

Cast against type, Black was asked to portray a depressed best man of the groom without any trace of his patented wild man-lost boy schtick. He underplayed, and underwhelmed as a Bergman-esque ensemble player, exposing his lack of range as a dramatic actor.

Fast-becoming the Robin Williams of his generation, "Gulliver's Travels" relegates the one-trick pony leading man to his tried-and-true antics, which seems to consist primarily of channeling his guitar heroes whenever he gets excitable, that is to say, nearly always.

Without the presence of a strong personality behind the camera, Black's performances will inevitably go to eleven. His work here is no exception. Lucky for him, his schtick hasn't grown entirely tiresome yet, first seen eleven years ago in Stephen Frears' "High Fidelity", championing Katrina & the Waves over Belle & Sebastian, by dancing to "Walking on Sunshine" along the vinyl stacks.

Point taken. You can't dance to "sad bastard music". The record clerk was the first in a long line of slackers that he would come to specialize in playing; his latest underachiever, Gulliver, a hapless mailboy at a seemingly thriving New York newspaper, is just the sort of undeterred sad sack Black can embody in his sleep, and without a good script, it's auto-pilot time, since he's essentially playing the same character as the faux schoolteacher in the Richard Linklater film from 2004.

At least that slacker could play a musical instrument, the electric guitar, whereas Gulliver wields a pathetic toy one for the wildly popular video game. Out of love and desperation, Gulliver makes matters worse, when the newly demoted mail clerk(his trainee, played by T.

J. Miller, becomes his boss) lies to the sexy travel editor about his writing ability and affinity for travel, since he wants Darcy(Amanda Peet)...badly. Because of their opposing stations at the paper, Gulliver doesn't dare act on his impulses, so he does something about this inequality.

The fake musician becomes a fake journalist, as well, by fooling the seasoned old pro with plagiarized writing samples that he parlays into an assignment on the mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle. After his boat penetrates an inverted whirlpool, the mail clerk wakes up in Liliput, a place where he can start over, be a big shot, and does so accordingly, exerting his size and stature as a false idol over the Liliputian people, treating them like Star Wars action figures, like puppets.

As the kingdom's ruler, dictator, really, Gulliver usurps the power from Liliput's king the very moment he pisses on the royal, which the film disguises purely as a rescue, a fire that the giant extinguishes with a torrent of urine.

The king calls Gulliver "a savior", but weren't they managing just fine without him? This act of seeming benevolence looks more and more like the actions of a man who's marking his territory.

In other words, the thirty-something American is planting his flag. The pee acts like a colonizing agent. Gulliver employs the Liliputians as slaves, working these "ridiculously good builders" to the bone, enabling him to enjoy the good life.

Instead of Christianity, he promotes the idea of cinema as religion, forcing the tiny people to watch secular stories("Star Wars" and "Titanic") as if they were holy, in which the words of Lucas and Cameron become the priests who transcribed the word of God.

Gulliver never stops to consider that the Liliputians have their own stories to tell. They're Americanized. "Gulliver's Travels", like a lot of Hollywood movies(especially the old ones), is gerrymandered in the colonizer's favor; it's a product of the manifest destiny tradition, so as a result, the film seems unaware that Edward, the supposed traitor of Liliput who switches allegiances in order to combat his fellow countrymen, may actually be the hero.