Review: Tim Burton’s Dumbo Gives Its Corporate Overlord What It Mostly Wants

Tim Burton manages to put his stamp on this clunky behemoth of a film, but in the end, the Mouse always wins.

Dumbo
Photo: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

The last time Tim Burton teamed up with Disney to reimagine one of the studio’s animated classics as a CGI-laden live-action spectacle, the result was Alice in Wonderland, a garish exhibition of Burton’s worst impulses, right down to Johnny Depp’s nauseatingly over-the-top mugging. Now, Disney has handed Burton the keys to one of its sweetest and most peculiar properties, Dumbo, the fable-like tale of a downtrodden little circus elephant with big, funny ears who learns how to fly. But this time around, for good and ill, the corporate powers that be appear to have kept Burton on a much shorter leash.

Burton’s version isn’t only one of the most conventional works of his career, it’s also a much safer, blander film than the original, which, after all, included a surrealistic dream sequence and a song-and-dance number featuring crows as thinly veiled African-American stereotypes. While Burton’s film understandably jettisons the latter of these scenes completely, its charming but all-too-brief allusion to the former speaks to the film’s fundamentally restricted ambitions. In 1941, Disney may have felt comfortable giving its audience five minutes of whacked-out proto-psychedelic weirdness in a film that barely topped 60 minutes, Burton’s film offers only a short scene of circus performers blowing bubbles that look like pink elephants—just enough to remind us of the original while doing nothing to recapture its spirit.

Bizarrely, Burton’s film turns the focus away from Dumbo himself and toward a group of human characters whose arcs are perfunctory to the point of distraction. The film’s ostensible protagonist is Holt Farrier (Colin Farrell), a WWII veteran with a missing arm who rejoins his job at the low-rent traveling Medici Bros. Circus after being discharged. He also reunites with his son and daughter, Joe (Finley Hobbins) and Milly (Nico Parker), two tykes who are, like their father, so flat that they may as well not even be there. And it’s these kids—rather than a garrulous mouse with a red hat—who teach Dumbo how to fly, a process that’s depicted so haphazardly that viewers are liable to miss it if they’re not paying close attention.

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If Dumbo is so conspicuously uninterested in these characters and their stories, including the screenplay’s tacked-on lessons about believing in oneself, that’s probably because Burton is too busy tending to his film’s whimsical 1910s carnival milieu. And to his credit, the filmmaker does create some indelibly imaginative environments here. In its first half, the film draws inspiration from vintage circus advertisements, Tod Browning’s 1932 horror classic Freaks, and the self-conscious tackiness of Ripley’s Believe It or Not! to conjure up a nostalgic but chintzy world of big tops, sideshows, and slightly frightening clowns, all lorded over by a two-bit version of P.T. Barnum named Max Medici (Danny DeVito).

But Dumbo only really kicks into gear when the circus gets bought up by a slick corporate con man, V.A. Vandevere (Michael Keaton, competing with DeVito for the loudest scenery-chewer), who moves the whole show to Dreamland, a lavish Art Deco extravaganza located on the Coney Island boardwalk. When the characters first arrive at the amusement park, Burton treats the moment with the grandiloquent pomp and circumstance of a Cecil B. DeMille epic as filtered through the bizarro circus spectacle of Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped. Burton imagines Dreamland—a real-life attraction that burned down in 1911—as a sprawling temple of syncretic Americana, equal parts state fair, haunted house, and Epcot Center, but he can’t seem to decide whether it’s a retrofuturist utopia or a nightmarish vision of corporate greed.

It’s tempting to read that tension as evidence of Burton’s ambivalence toward his own Vandevere-like patron, the Walt Disney Company. Submerged beneath the film’s unconvincing melodrama and expensive CGI effects, there’s a murky fascination with the role of capital in producing and sustaining art. Even Vandevere has to please his own monied master, a rich Wall Street exec (Alan Arkin) who puts up the dough for Dreamland. Ultimately, though, Burton’s not enough of a subversive to truly bite the hand that feeds him. He gives his corporate overlords what they want and what they presume audiences crave, namely shameless schmaltz and the sort of mind-numbing action-packed climax you can find in any one of Disney’s largely interchangeable Marvel superhero movies.

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Score: 
 Cast: Colin Farrell, Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Eva Green, Alan Arkin, Nico Parker, Finley Hobbins, Roshan Seth, DeObia Oparei, Joseph Gatt, Sharon Rooney, Michael Buffer, Frank Bourke, Jo Osmond  Director: Tim Burton  Screenwriter: Ehren Kruger  Distributor: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures  Running Time: 112 min  Rating: PG  Year: 2019  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Keith Watson

Keith Watson is the proprietor of the Arkadin Cinema and Bar in St. Louis, Missouri.

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