[I first viewed this film on DVD
a few times, and wrote initial notes and a draft of a review. I wanted to view
the film again, and did, but have held off being thorough in my preparation
here. Long story why. Meanwhile, am hustling this out for a nod to
modern-tastes fun.]
[Edits 5/17/13 afternoon.]
Seth MacFarlane has been
the creative mind behind the cable cartoon Family
Guy (see his bio for the years), which I’ve only glimpsed through snatches
shown to me on a computer (in YouTube samples, I think) by one of my nephews.
It struck me as a sort of more-off-color version of the TV cartoon/sitcom The Simpsons, which I say admitting I
don’t know Family Guy too well. (I
also don’t have much familiarity with
The Simpsons.)
(The Simpsons itself, in general terms, is interesting. Created by
cartoonist Matt Groening, it is so well-known and so long-running that people
would think it was the only means by which to know Matt Groening, similarly to
how you’d know Lucille Ball “only” by her I
Love Lucy TV show—as if her previous movie career, such as it was, never
existed—and it certainly was rudimentary. But back in the 1980s, Groening used
to do a cartoon, appearing in alternative newspapers and running for some years,
called Life in Hell, which I used to
read as a fan when living in the Washington, D.C., area. It had a reliably
black-humorous and droll-details-of-life quality that was similar to Simpsons material, but the Simpsons stuff has been watered down,
predictably, for a TV audience. But in the years since it premiered, the
Simpsons’ approach, even if watered down, became so accepted that Family Guy, per the desideratum for
meeting an edgier criterion [for marketing purposes or not], could afford to
take the area of cartoon/risque humor a step further. And maybe, though I haven’t
compared them side-by-side, you could say Family
Guy appears raunchier than even the print cartoon Life in Hell usually was.)
In more recent news (i.e., from
this receding winter), Mr. MacFarlane was tried out as a new host for the
Oscars ceremony this year, and it seems that, along with the overall quality of
the show, his type of humor didn’t sit well with numerous critics (at least,
older ones). Meanwhile, I heard that approval of him was stronger among younger
viewers, to whom the Oscars producers apparently had wanted to appeal (by
including him) anyway.
Ted surprises with its
popularity; it turns out to be well tooled, technically
When I first heard Ted’s future release announced last
year, I thought it would be interesting to see what this would be like, not
least because I was familiar with the issue of “transitional objects” (see my review of the movie The Beaver).
Then, when the movie was released last spring, critics revealed that Teddy had
a real potty mouth, and he consorted with hookers and smoked pot. But the film
also turned out to be a big hit.
I was still interested to see
it, but my typical practice in recent years is to wait until new films that I
want to see are on DVD before I see them. (Plus, I tend to steer clear of reviewing
very recent releases, for the main reason that when a film is still a
commercial proposition, still recouping production costs from sales based on
recent-release familiarity, I don’t want to “interfere with an ongoing
commercial endeavor.” That is, older films, whose DVDs are sold to libraries
and otherwise now, can only benefit from such homely attention as mine, even if
with negative comments; but works that are still “hot properties” may trigger
some J.D.-advised functionary to send some notice my way intoning things about “tortious
interference with business prospect,” or whatever; and even if this fear in
unrealistic, I’d rather not take the chance. But Ted has made so much money worldwide in a year of release, that I
don’t think my cheers and spittle here will pose it any threat.)
On viewing Ted, I see how today’s movies, especially those appealing to
younger viewers, are amazing for a couple of “production values” they hew to: when
there is weaving in of fantasy effects (where the story incorporates this), CGI
can do such a good job (it can, but
it isn’t always used to this effect);
and the electronic processing of even real-life material that is filmed can
give things such a smooth, “creamy” sheen today. (That is, electronic
processing of live-action film goes beyond such “big processing” of live-action
film as there used to be—which as far as I know was only, or not much more
than, “color timing”—i.e., getting colors to be consistent throughout a film,
which in the original prints may have varied due to lighting during production,
the way negatives were developed, and/or such. Now you can do computerized
tweaks to live-action shots, even where not including fantasy elements, to
smooth out the look.)
Thus, scenes in Ted such as in a restaurant or at a
dance can be so stylized, with colors nicely rendered (and art-school contrasts
such as pink for warmth and bluish for contrasting “coolness”), and blemishes
on actors “air-brushed” out, etc., that you feel you’re looking at a
gloss-everything-over, high-end magazine. Mila Kunis here looks so much
like a model in Vogue that she seems
key to the film’s virtually aiming to evoke a fantasy of the life of young,
middle-class youth when it is dealing with real-action drama apart from the obvious fantasy element
of a talking and moving teddy bear in a 35-year-old man’s life. I’m not
complaining, necessarily; the smoothed-over quality of this film adds a certain
charm to it.
The story opens up the possibility to be complicated and subtle, but
simplifies things for itself
Now mind you, I like this film;
it is quite funny when it hews to its truly accomplished aims, in Teddy’s own
character spiritedly holding forth. The following is a bit of a quibble.
Where Ted really calls for close criticism is in how it marries its story
elements of man with “arrested development”—his best (male) friend is his teddy
bear (which has ended up talking, as a result of a kid’s wish he made in the
mid-1980s)—and, thus, how the man (with bear) interrelates with his beautiful
girlfriend, who eventually finds her boyfriend’s attachment to his bear is
effectively sabotaging their relationship. This
story is both about as simple as that sounds and yet more complicated. Or
rather, it could have been more complicated if it traced out, through plot
expansion, some lifelike implications, but it opts not to do all this.
As a result, if you think too
hard about the film, it runs into problems of credibility now and then, and in
other ways you may feel it’s rather incomplete. For instance, Mila’s character
Lori Collins (with the whole film taking place in Boston, with some
“appropriate” local color like some blue-collarish Boston accents, Lori doesn’t
really look like a Lori Collins—which name conjures up an
image of an Irish American girl…oh, never mind) seems awfully patient with Mark Wahlberg’s John. You would think that in real life, if an attractive girl
like this cavorted with a male who was associated with an animated teddy bear
with whom he seems so enmeshed, she would hurry away to just about any other male who gives some reasonable
expectation of being gainfully employed (and at a better job than John’s
car-rental place).
(The story includes her
referring to John as the hottest guy in town, or such, which is a TV-story type
of premise—the sort of throwaway idea that could be used to explain a “love is
blind” motivation without doing anything further, though some would say in Lori’s
case that for her to overlook the teddy bear side means love in her case isn’t
only blind, it’s severely head-injured.)
What really makes this film
entertaining is the “performance” by Teddy, voiced by MacFarlane, which marries
a “cute” teddy bear appearance to ribald humor, and language and references
that work hard to earn this film an R rating. What makes this humor work in a
lot of instances is the timing, the spontaneity that somehow excuses the
coarser jokes. That is, sometimes the quickness of the wit overrides the fact
that the jokes may seem a little too crude, just as when you’re hanging out
with a life-of-the-party guy, his running spiel may seem to fall short of true
imaginativeness at some points, but the sheer spirit in his always delivering something makes him a riot nonetheless.
(See the DVD making-of stuff on how MacFarlane achieved this important matter
of timing—by performing Teddy’s lines off-camera, hooked up to some CGI-production-related
wires, while also directing the film.)
And somehow the humor—rich in
topical references, easy-joke pop-culture references, and occasional,
indulged-in “politically incorrect” ethnic and gay-directed humor—seems to
bridge (1) a younger audience (twenties and thirties) that is so “meta” about
pop culture they’ve consumed endlessly from the past 40 or so years and (2) an
older, boomer audience to whom some of this humor might echo the most evocative
of the likes of George Carlin, Richard Pryor, and other comics of a
boundary-busting sort. There may be points where you feel a joke appeals to a
younger audience than yourself, and other points where it seems to have your
number. And the fact that this variety of joking blends together as well as it
does is a testament, again, to the bubbling spirit in which it is done.
Another way this film has an
old-fashioned quality is in MacFarlane’s way of making Teddy seem like a bit of
a blue-collar lout, with his city-area accent and slightly flat vocal timbre.
This sort of thing is like Bugs Bunny, from the 1940s-50s high-water-mark time
of the Warner Brothers cartoon characters, speaking with a Bronx or Brooklyn
accent, and the Hanna-Barbera character of Fled Flintstone speaking with some
kind of blue-collarish accent too. (It even seems to echo a bit the likes of
Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden and Carroll O’Connor’s Archie Bunker, though those
two decidedly weren’t presented as cartoon characters.) This technique may have
pandered to more factory-worker type audiences, but it also helped mold a
particularly American kind of cartoon archetype: the wiseguy character (Bugs,
on occasion: “Ain’t I a stinker?”) with the street-smarts city-area accent,
whom we end up loving for his good side anyway.
And throughout Ted, the motor-mouth quality of Teddy
(and the sight gags he’s worked into) keep this film entertaining, so you never
are left stewing in the contemplation of a joke that doesn’t quite appeal to
you; you’re brought to another, better one pretty quickly.
Sidebar:
On the matter of ethnic jokes: This
can be a tricky area. Obviously, it depends on the taste of the audience; some viewers
of a certain ethnic background may not appreciate having their ethnic group
joked on in some coarse way, while other people of the same group may have more
generosity about letting it go—one key to the “magic” of a joke is in enjoying
the humor apart from the content, which is really tested when the joke is
somehow on us. Level of viewer intelligence
may be a key factor to how acceptable some jokes are. But also, how these jokes
color the character using them may come into play: some might excuse (or blame)
Teddy as a bit of a boor with his ethnic remarks sometimes, but we like him
still, all things considered. TV
humor often seems to trade in ethnic jokes; with CBS’s sitcom 2 Broke Girls, which I’ve thought I
would do a blog entry on, the ethnic jokes and stereotypes represented by some
characters seem to offend some viewers, and I think the ethnic joking doesn’t have to be as crude there as it is.
Again, this is an area of variation in taste, and overall employing such jokes seems
to run some risk among many viewers.
Things that limit Ted to a
more mature audience
The humor, as I said, can be
ribald; the most over-the-top scene may be where Lori comes home, with John not
far behind her, and finds Teddy seated on a couch in their apartment with four
prostitutes; and not only has the group of them tied one on big-time, but one
of the women, per Teddy, has relieved herself on the floor. Teddy’s patter just
adds to the off-color fun (he talks about a horrible Adam Sandler movie they had
just indulged in viewing, and “It’s unwatchable, but they’re [the guests are] hookers,
so it’s fine”).
The drug humor really
presupposes some audience familiarity with (and some level of acceptance of)
the marijuana world, which may be OK by a fair number of younger viewers. For
instance, there is one joke I don’t have enough personal knowledge (via friends
from years ago) to vouch for, but it seems credible enough: when Teddy wanted
an uptick in the quality of his pot from his “weed guy,” he was told about the options
“Mind rape”; “Gorilla panic”; “They’re coming, they’re coming”; and “This is
permanent.” This isn’t your father’s movie pot joke. (Question: How does a boy’s
cuddly teddy get associated with a “weed guy” in the first place?)
One funny twist is that the film
seems to start off almost in a Spielberg-ish fashion, with a semi-serious look
at how John, when young in suburban tract-house land, first was disposed to
wish for a real friend, which turned out to be his talking teddy. The smell of
this that’s like E.T. (1982) is
underscored by one sight-gag picture of John and Teddy in a bicycle situation
echoing a representative scene from E.T.
But also, there’s an Adam Sandler touch when, showing how friendless John was
when he was eight, local Boston boys are beating up the sole Jewish kid on the
block, and even the Jewish kid doesn’t want to associate with John.
The fantasy/reality marriage doesn’t seem fully thought through, but…
The thing with this kind of
fantasy story—where you humorously insert a fantasy element into a middle-class
milieu that seems otherwise normal, in this case a talking teddy bear within a
girl-and-boy story—is that some implications of this premise-mixing aren’t
squared with. For instance, how did the bear get so much more potty-mouthed and
worldly-wise than John? (Was it in his genes? But let’s not forget—in today’s
genetics-obsessed culture—the nature
versus nurture debate, which is always relevant in any question of declined
or dysfunctional human behavior. That is, both nature and nurture come into
play. Genetics doesn’t explain all.)
Indeed, is this bear in need of
some serious psychological help, if he’s become reliant on pot as he has? Does
he suffer from depression, even a dysthymic kind (low-level, with intermittent-crisis)?
And if he’s been John’s best buddy for so long, did John somehow have a
negative influence on him? And whatever the answer, how is it that John seems less
a worldly-wise sort than Teddy does?
Another thought I had may sound sexist
at first, but it really isn’t: you’ll notice that in the film’s burnishing its
live-action look, Mila Kunis looks a lot like a doll herself. So how is it that,
with such a female companion on hand, John is still in thrall to his teddy? Of
course, in a sense, the film deals with this—it’s brought out by Lori that he
seems slow to grow up (to the point where she parts ways with him, though
temporarily), and he needs to learn to value his adult connection to Lori more
(which latter point Teddy, on the verge of succumbing to fatal injuries,
reminds him of).
But this whole dimension of the
human–human relationship seems not fully explored; this is seen not least after
a serious accident has taken Teddy’s “spirit” away, when Lori ends up wishing
Teddy back to life (the wish includes some apparent intervention of a shooting
star, Spielberg-like), and she reveals she did this because she wanted her life back with John (which included
the morale-support Teddy gives him). With this, the film claims to have found a
way to wrap up the whole thematic package. But this seems a bit too easy to me.
But then we may be talking about
a different film, maybe like The Beaver,
which wasn’t a big hit. Dealing
seriously with the issue of a grown person’s use of a transitional object isn’t
what young audiences crave today. But
a film detailing the entertaining
comments of a teddy bear who is more of a self-indulgent slob than his
owner/human-friend is—now that appeals. And in this narrow way, the film is
quite a fun ride.
Among a few nice details…
* Giovanni Ribisi is on
hand as a quirky/nerdy young dad with a lonely, weird young son—they both have
been obsessed with Teddy since Teddy had made the news for his unique quality
as a talking, moving, human-like Teddy bear. Ribisi’s dad is crucial to the
plot development where he and his son kidnap Teddy and, after John’s attempt to
get Teddy back, with Ribisi’s and his son’s being equally in the chase after
Teddy, Teddy gets almost completely pulled apart at a sports stadium.
A wall in the dad-and-son’s
house with “creep-you-out” news clips and such all over it, accompanied
by a soundtrack sampling of weird music from Kubrick’s The Shining, underscores the putative stalking-weirdo role Ribisi
is to play. His leisure-time dancing obsessively before a 1980s Tiffany video
brings home how outre he is, but adds to the fun.
