Sunday, March 12, 2006
Cold March
March of the Penguins is one of those movies predigested for you by the memes of popular culture in one of its many word-of-mouth stomachs and then regurgitated out for you to provide cooing. How can the movie miss with a starring cast of thousands, each one fascinating, with a screen magnetism any starlet would envy?
The kiddie-approved aura of the movie can last as long as you want it to — it just depends if you want to really pay attention, or just watch the incredible creatures in their march of mating and food seeking, the dance of life in a cold clime. If you do pay attention though this is no kiddie movie. The rigors and heartlessness that is the realm of the natural world comes home hard. These amazing, quirkily beautiful figures out of a bestiary, have tough going keeping alive, let alone breeding. It's almost a joke what Mother Nature puts them through.
But the movie is worth the trouble because even with all the schmaltz these two French guys who made the movie ladle over the subject matter you just can't drain the power of the natural — you remember these creatures, you think about them. Penguins remind you of seals, of birds, of fish, of reptiles. Another example, like camels, of a creature put together by a committee, they move at a pace that is uncanny in its resonance with human rhythms — from a distance they look like a group of old men shuffling along. Almost everything they do reminds you of something. The rhythms of their lives are human feeling — they seem to experience their lives. They are resonant animals who might as well be living on another planet — so little contact do we have with them, so unfamiliar are we with their lives, so lucky are they for that.