The G and PG scene is, on the whole, pretty grim. “The Ratatouilles” and “Were-Rabbits” of the world are few and far between, and the ‘Pirates’ franchise wore out its welcome quick. “City of Ember” succeeds in being one of those rare PG films that both children and their parents can enjoy, thanks to thoughtful storytelling, excellent casting, and beautifully bleak set design as effective as the underground worlds of “The City of Lost Children”* or “The Goonies” [*ed. a masterful film]. An unexplained catastrophe has sent the last of our population underground, where engineers known as “Builders” have created a city meant to last for 200 years, complete with instructions each mayor is meant to protect and pass on for the last mayor – instructions that went missing years ago. We find Ember several years past its expiration date and literally falling apart. It is led by a corpulent and creepy Mayor Cole (played with sinister geniality by Bill Murray), who has no idea that the Builders intended for him to eventually lead the people of Ember to the Earth’s surface. All he knows is that blackouts are getting longer, food and supplies are running out, and that his vague assurances won’t soothe the public much longer. His call for an investigation into the blackouts by a specially selected task force is reminiscent of, oh, every clueless politician ever. The only other people who seem to sense that Ember’s time is up are our two young heroes: Doon Harrow, played by Harry Treadaway (Joy Division’s drummer in “Control“), and Lina Mayfleet (Saoirse Ronan, of “Atonement” fame).
Lina and Doon quickly find that Ember is running on fumes. When she’s not sprinting around time delivering messages in a tattered red cape, Lina finds a dusty box in her grandmother’s closet that contains tattered instructions left by the builders, but the paper is torn and missing pieces, rendering the instructions meaningless. Meanwhile, Doon explores the pipes and tunnels under the city, stumbling upon a locked room, hidden tunnels, and notably, a giant star-nosed mole with pink, slimy sausage-sized tentacles and an appetite for human flesh. In a genre overrun by super special effects galore, ghost pirates and killer robots, there’s something refreshingly scary about being chased by a giant tentacle-y mole. Maybe I’m just old-fashioned. Our heroes do what heroes always do, put together clues so that at the last possible moment they might escape the disaster.
Rounding out the fantastic cast are Tim Robbins as Doon’s father, a slightly defeated mechanic who builds strange, unsafe, and highly specialized inventions in an apartment littered with whirlygigs and doodads; Marianne Jean-Baptiste as Clary, a local farmer with a rebellious past and a secret tunnel in her greenhouse; Mary Kay Place as a religious nut in deep denial; the delightful Martin Landau as Doon’s single-minded boss; and Toby Jones of “Infamous” infamy as the mayor’s skuzzy underling. There’s even a delightful cameo by kooky hipster folksinger Lavender Diamond as the choral master (she wrote the song for the choir).
Something nagged at us for awhile after seeing “City of Ember,” something I thought of as a hole in the plot, a general lack of character development. Now it seems like the sort of theme that’s so obvious it takes you awhile to articulate. Why are the citizens of Ember so complacent in the face of what is clearly an imminent and grisly demise? (And I do mean grisly. This is a dark movie with some heavy ideas for kids and adults to chew on. Aside from the whole post-apocalyptic setting, you’ve got corruption, complacency, starvation, and the images of being trapped in pitch-black darkness miles underground, with nothing to do but starve and wander blindly while listening for sounds of giant, hungry, man-eating moles and beetles.) Food is running out, storerooms are clearly devoid of supplies, and blackouts occur with increasing frequency and length, yet no one is freaking out except for our two heroes. Clearly the complacency they face provides the contrast for their courage and initiative, but isn’t it also a mirror of the audience? Will future generations look back at us and wonder as we did in the theater, “Why didn’t they do something?!” More importantly, will families leave the theater today thinking, “Why don’t we do something?”[A-]
[*ed. Instead, Dad got him a small spot in “W” as one of Dubya’s head speechwriters]
