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DIRECTED BY: Barry Levinson
FEATURING: Robin Williams, Joan Cusack, Michael Gambon, Robin Wright, LL Cool J, Donald O’Connor
PLOT: Whimsical toymaker Kenneth Zevo leaves his company to his army general brother Leland, bypassing his head-in-the-clouds son Leslie; when Leland shifts the factory’s production to military weapons controlled by children, Leslie goes into battle with his mad uncle to save the company and the world from violence and mayhem.
COMMENTS: A while back, on the occasion of my review of the big ball of whimsy that is Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium, my colleagues here at 366 HQ took to the comment section to observe that I missed the opportunity to pair it up with a review of a similarly fanciful tale of the life-changing power of toys. I don’t regret passing up that moment, because now I can don my Santa hat and give Toys the chance to stand on its own merits. And now that I’ve done that, I have to say that it makes me think more favorably upon Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium.
Toys was a notorious bomb at the time of its release, an outcome that surely had something to do with the wild disconnect between the movie audiences were promised and the one they got. Toys was pitched courtesy of a very buzzy teaser that featured star Williams alone in a field riffing without restraint with nary a single frame of the actual movie to distract. If you saw this (or if you had popped into the multiplex auditorium next door to hear Williams similarly unleashed in Aladdin), you were primed for a raucous comedy featuring Robin-off-the-chain. The opening minutes of saccharine Christmas imagery, pastoral nostalgia, and a decidedly un-funky carol from Wendy and Lisa must have been a real cold shower.
It turns out that Toys is a dour film, beginning with a funeral, ending with a war, and delivering a volume’s worth of personality quirks and emotional damage in between. The mere existence of toys is supposed to be a balm of mirth, but even these people who rely upon them seem to derive little joy from them. This is a movie whose idea of showing the jolly, happy world of toymaking is to score it with the warm, sentimental tones of Tori Amos. (When the same song returns to demonstrate the drudgery of toiling under a new regime, the only change is to give it a techno remix.) You want fun? The dying toy magnate has a goofy beanie hat hooked up to a heart monitor. The quirky daughter lives inside an enormous swan that closes like a coffin. The straight-laced nephew converts to the side of light and life only because he discovers that he and his father have been sleeping with the same nurse. I think that delight is supposed to leaven the sadness, but the sadness actually crushes delight under its oppressive weight. No one is having a good time; even the people play-testing fake vomit are obsessive and pedantic, and it’s hard to imagine that the finished product would be much more entertaining, since Zevo’s toys are all throwbacks to the lead wind-up models of yesteryear. They’re awful, and while the war-themed offerings Leland devises are reprehensible in their own way, at least they make sense.
The plot device of turning control over to the warmongering brother is not only counterintuitive but baffling because of the utter confusion over just what Leland’s problem is. He’s not merely a crusty grownup; if anything, he defaults to childish acting-out when he doesn’t get his way. And he doesn’t just romanticize the glories of war. No, when he gets behind the wheel of a video game car, he specifically targets noncombatants, suggesting a psychopathy that the movie never really reckons with. Gambon tries his hardest to play all the different notes he’s given, but the fact is, there’s nothing consistent in the character for him to play.
It also pains me to lay a significant portion of the blame for Toys’ failure at the feet of Williams. There’s a notion that he was the quintessential boy-who-never-grew-up, but I’m going to take the heterodox stance that Williams was at his worst when asked to portray a child-at-heart. Time after time—Hook, Jack, Patch Adams—his characters come across as smug or deluded rather than laden with innocent charm. That’s particularly damaging here, because if you believe that a pure heart and an innocent soul are the only antidote to a harsh and brutal world, it would be nice for that pristine character to demonstrate a shred of it. I’m hard-pressed to think of a single moment within Toys when Williams smiles. His pop-culture references land with a thud, his romance with a poorly-used Wright is perfunctory and out of sync with the rest of the film, and he never has a notable interaction with a single character beyond Cusack, who is revealed to be less-than-human in her own way. It’s so strange that this ode to the power of play opts to invoke the depressing vibe of a hundred “Charlie Brown Christmas” specials.
It kills me that the most eye-rolling, pandering idea that Levinson has to offer turns out to be one of the few moments in the film when it seems to know what it wants to be. The movie comes to a near halt when Williams and Cusack conspire to distract the building’s security staff with a Talking Heads pastiche, featuring Magritte-inspired imagery and the finest chroma-key effects of the day. For about three minutes, Toys finds a tone that makes sense: surrealist pranksters out to subvert the humorless establishment. But the moment passes.
There is one element of Toys that works, and another that almost does. The success story is without a doubt the Oscar-nominated production design from Ferdinando Scarfiotti, which creates a spectacular milieu of candy-colored buildings and playful icons rising up out of stunningly green landscapes like Teletubbies on LSD. Scarfiotti may be the only person on the production indulging a playful mindset. The near-miss is a subplot about using war toys to turn children into actual weapons of war. Toys manages to glimpse the future, anticipating drone warfare and hinting at a hard stance against indoctrinating the minds of children with violence and hostility. But then Williams and Co. send their tin-toy troops into battle against Gambon’s combative playthings, and any notion of moral high ground goes up in flames. If there’s a lesson to be learned in Toys, it’s quickly lost in the smoke and the jittery slow-mo. Toys ends up like a shiny new bicycle under the Christmas tree —only disassembled, and with no instructions.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
“ Apart from all the mechanical weirdness, every last shred of reality in Toys-land is so skewed that it does not even seem weird that Robin Williams’ cousin is black commando LL Cool J and his uncle (his father’s brother and Cool J’s father) speaks with a British accent… There’s very little but the strangeness of it all propping up Toys. Far too little effort seems to have been given to the development of characters, story, momentum and plausibility (even on its own eccentric terms).” – Marjorie Baumgarten, Austin Chronicle (contemporaneous)
(This movie was nominated for review by Matt. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
Well I’ll be a monkey’s! Published on Christmas day and everything!
I nearly queued this for review on the video channel, but once again am grateful to Shane for doing the grunt work so I don’t have to.
He’s not wrong; but I like this film because of that weird disconnect. This was a pet project of his from the late 70s and a whiff of that spirit lingers through – very faint, but its there.
It possibly would’ve been more DR. STRANGELOVE in tone had it been made earlier.
I’m with ERH on this one. The movie is a deeply flawed hot mess that still manages to live rent-free in my head every Christmas. The deeply weird cognitive dissonance is its own special flavor.