Doctor Dolittle

Betty Thomas’s Doctor Dolittle takes the name and the gift from Hugh Lofting’s books and leaves nearly everything else behind. The doctor is now a San Francisco physician with a nice house and a sale pending; the animals are the pigeons, rats and strays of a city rather than the creatures of a storybook; and the script, by Larry Levin and Nat Mauldin, is about whether three doctors will sell their practice to a health company. It runs 85 minutes. That is the right length for the joke and about twenty minutes longer than the story, and the result is a comedy that is funny in pieces and flat across the whole.

Eddie Murphy plays Dolittle almost entirely straight. He is a man in a good suit who has just been insulted by a dog and would like it to stop, and most of his work is reaction: the blink, the look over the shoulder, the decision not to answer back in front of his partners. It is a disciplined performance and a generous one, since it hands every laugh to the animals. It also means the film has no engine of its own. The Murphy of the eighties talked faster than anyone else on screen; this one mostly listens, and when the animals are off screen there is not much to listen to.

The animals are the film. Lucky, the stray Dolittle clips with his car, is voiced by Norm Macdonald as a dog who has read the small print on life and found it wanting, and the first time he sat up in the road and called the doctor a bonehead we laughed out loud and against our better judgement. The mouths are a mix of animatronics and effects work and they are good enough that we stopped noticing them, which is the test. A guinea pig with a grievance, a pair of pigeons, a rat on the surgery floor: each gets a line, the line is usually rude, and the rudeness is usually about bottoms. Children will not mind. We minded a little by the fourth one.

The humans are given the plot and it is not a good plot. Oliver Platt’s Mark Weller wants the money, Peter Boyle’s Calloway is the man offering it, Richard Schiff’s Gene Reiss stands between them looking anxious, and Jeffrey Tambor turns up as a psychiatrist to decide whether a man who talks to pigeons is well. We were bored by the sale of the practice, properly bored, and we doubt a child of eight cares who owns a doctor’s surgery either. Ossie Davis, as Dolittle’s father, has one scene of real weight near the start and is then left to wait. Kristen Wilson, as Lisa, gets the wife’s lot of standing in doorways. The one human strand that means anything is Kyla Pratt’s Maya, the younger, odder daughter who likes animals and is told she should like people, and the film gives her perhaps six minutes.

The craft is sitcom craft, done competently. Russell Boyd lights everything bright and even, so that the surgery, the house and the hospital look like three sets on the same lot. William A. Elliott’s production design is clean and anonymous in the same way. Sharen Davis puts Murphy in sober grey suits, which tells you more about the man he has become than the script does. Peter Teschner cuts to the animal for the reaction every time, which is the correct instinct and becomes a tic. Richard Gibbs’s score tells you when to feel warm, about a beat before the scene has earned it.

Three years earlier Babe had shown that a film could make the animals’ mouths move and still give the animals a story. Here the mouths move and the story belongs to the people, and the film never notices the mistake. Several of the reviews found it sagging in the last third, and we agree, though we would put the sag earlier: once the surgery is full and the partners are worried, the picture has about three more ideas and a tiger.

Most critics landed in the middle, one warm, three cool, three cold, and that spread is about right. For a small child on a wet afternoon it will do: the dog is funny, the rat is funny, and nothing in it will frighten anyone, which is what the PG is for. For the adults sitting beside them it is a dozen good lines, a patient leading man and a lot of waiting for the next animal.