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Re: Warm Bodies
This.
Sincerely,
Fans of Supernatural Love Stories and Everybody Else
I knew it wouldn't take long for somebody to really get out there and make a better Twilight. Heck, the only place to go from Twilight was up, so there was pretty low ceiling for failure. Yet, Jonathan Levine's adaptation of Isaac Marion's zombie love story, Warm Bodies, is such a tight and alarmingly heartwarming narrative that it makes you wonder how Twilight made it to bookstores and the silver screen first, despite the very clear and reasonable evidence that without Twilight there would be no Warm Bodies. With that in mind, we almost have to thank Stephanie Meyer for screwing the pooch so royally that dozens of others were inspired to clean up her mess. And what a masterful job Levine did in adapting one of the best attempts to clean up the Twilight mess.
Warm Bodies is a simple, yet reasonably original, love story that acknowledges and comments some of literature and pop cultures best inter-species love stories from the most obvious, Romeo & Juliet, to the contemporary, Twilight of course, and everything in between, including Edward Scissorhands and Beauty and The Beast. At the center of Bodies is R (Nicholas Hoult), a teen, or maybe twenty-something, zombie who spends his days stumbling through an abandoned airport in the aftermath of an ill-defined, possibly supernatural, zombie apocalypse and barely making small talk with his one "friend", M (Rob Corddry). On a "routine" hunt for food (read: brains), R encounters a band of humans from one of the last surviving human settlements and is immediately infatuated with Julie (Teresa Palmer), who just so happens the daughter of fanatical human resistance leader (John Malkovich). After consuming the brain of Julie's boyfriend (Dave Franco), R "kidnaps" Julie, for her safety, taking her to the grounded plane he calls home, where he finds himself becoming more human as he gets closer to her. Admittedly, the setup is pretty rote, what with all the star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the track, but what makes Warm Bodies work is that this setup launches a very charming, tight narrative devoted to building a solid relationship between R and Julie rather than putting their relationship through the typical contrived Rom-Com paces.
In many ways, Warm Bodies is reminiscent of the best parts of The Artist: the charming characters (R moreso than Julie, easily), avoidance of rom-com tropes, and the focus on building a relationship rather than pasting it together. There's a moment near the midpoint, where R, who speaks through either internal monologue or barely understandable grunts, admits a pretty damning secret to Julie, and it is handled without melodrama or histrionics but a level of maturity and intelligence that is often lacking in both genre flicks and rom-coms. That moment is one of many, including a witty yet subdued Beauty-and-the-Beast scenario, that sold me on Levine's minimally schmaltzy take on the material. Beyond Levine's admirably restrained approach, Nicholas Hoult's portrayal of R is quite special because he imbues R with a reticent, almost reluctant charm. His R is that stock character who only wants a "normal" life, but he also acknowledges that his reality is not always pretty. He is essentially Peter Parker as a zombie, right down to the Red-Blue outfit. Yet, once he is exposed to the potential to become more human, R doggedly pursues his love and life without resorting to an abundance of moping or machismo. R is a great romantic lead because he is honest, earnest, and fallible, which makes him charming in a way that his closest contemporary, Edward Cullen, will never be.
Hoult's performance is critical to the relatively slow-burn nature of the flick, which is admittedly well-paced. With Warm Bodies, Levine does not rush the proceedings and instead lets the relationship between R and Julie grow slowly, giving the two a chance to develop trust beyond R's initial infatuation and allowing that trust to blossom into a relationship based on an oft-ignored concept called honesty. This approach also allows Levine to guide the movie beyond a simple romance, which is welcome because Warm Bodies really isn't about romance. It is a fable about the resilience of humanity in the face of its own inhumanity. Bodies may not be the most heady examination of that topic but at least it's ambitious enough to attempt to discuss such a weighty topic. As R's love for Julie blossoms over the course of the film, his physical body comes to reflect the struggle plaguing him since being turned. Essentially, it reveals a soul who, despite a very unique condition, struggles to hold onto the things that make him human. Even the character most likely voted as antagonist, Malcovich's cold Geneal Grigio, is a man struggling to hold on to humanity, in both a personal and explicitly broad sense, after losing his family in the wake of the Zombocalypse. Again, this flick touches on heavier issues than something like Twilight ever will, but it does so with a less-than-cynical outlook, which makes it altogether far more endearing than its contemporaries.
Yet, for all its bright spots, Warm Bodies is quite an acquired taste. It is can be intermittently uneventful, follows a pretty worn path, and the ending essentially requires us to believe in magic, which may alienate those already put off by the exhausted supernatural romance angle. Also, Hoult's R is far more likable and relatable than Palmer's more stoic and underserved Julie, leading Bodies into a space that Twilight always occupied where the female lead is far more stoic and less appealing than her suitors. This is particularly damaging because movies such as this need both leads to be equally appealing. Finally, there's some insightful commentary on zombie tropes that is occasionally chuckle-worthy, but most of it is no more insightful--yet still fairly clever--than most intelligent zombie fare. Still, Warm Bodies is not completely undone by its faults. The amount of heart on display is unmatched by most zombie narratives, and the optimism at the core of the movie is refreshing in an era where narratives about the supernatural seem more interested in remarking more on our capacity to destroy than our ability to build and persevere. Even more welcome, is the flicks attempt to show that love can blossom when both parties involved are honest and reasonably mature rather than the celibacy slavery that Meyer champions in her Twilight saga.
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