Tim Burton’s flying elephant is touching, but the thin human drama gives us too little reason to recommend the film. Danny DeVito and the circus offer some pleasure during the long waits for Dumbo to take centre stage.
Tim Burton’s Dumbo has an appealing elephant and too many people getting between him and the camera. The attempt to build a fuller family adventure around a circus animal makes sense, especially when there is room to ask who benefits from putting him on display. But the human drama is so thin that it feels like a delay whenever it takes over. We kept wanting to return to the creature whose name is on the film.
We were moved by Dumbo’s face; those expressive eyes make the distress of a digital creature surprisingly easy to accept. The animal has a convincing presence, and the slight oddness of his appearance helps him belong to a circus without becoming another piece of decoration. His flights through the arena are the passages that make the film’s enthusiasm easy to share. The camera has something worth following, and the story no longer needs so much explanation.
Rick Heinrichs’s production design offers a circus worth looking around and an elaborate Dreamland that sometimes seems more fully imagined than its inhabitants. These are places with enough character to sustain our attention even when the dialogue does not. Ben Davis’s cinematography is more rewarding during the flight sequences, when Dumbo’s movement gives the spectacle a clear focus. Elsewhere, the crowded effects can make the surroundings harder to take in, despite all the work that has gone into them.
Danny DeVito supplies some welcome bustle, playing Maximilian “Max” Medici with an appetite for performance that the quieter characters badly need. Michael Keaton’s V. A. Vandevere brings an enjoyable excess of his own, and their shared scenes briefly suggest a livelier film. Colin Farrell, as Holt Farrier, has the harder task of making a thinly written human lead matter beside a flying elephant. The performance cannot give those passages enough interest, though the writing leaves him little chance.
Ehren Kruger’s screenplay keeps adding human concerns without making them worth the time spent away from Dumbo. The human characters rarely surprise us, and their concerns give us little reason to wonder what they will do next. Chris Lebenzon’s editing does not solve that imbalance, and 112 minutes feels generous for the amount of story that holds our attention. The film remains busy, but the stretches between its pleasures grow tiring.
Danny Elfman’s music urges us to care about people the screenplay has barely developed. The sentiment can be welcome when Dumbo is the focus, because the animation has already given us something to respond to. It becomes wearing when the music has to do the work for everybody else. Too often, a scene asks for sympathy before establishing much beyond the fact that somebody is unhappy.
As family fantasy, this ought to be an easy film to enjoy: an unusual animal, a circus and the chance to fly. The complaint about corporate greed gives adults something to consider, but it does not make the human story more interesting. There are individual pleasures here if circus spectacle is enough to carry an evening. For a family night, we would choose this only if a flying elephant is enough to settle the discussion.
