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The Addams Family Confusedly Rolls Out the Freaky


The grand joke of The Addams Family for as long as they’ve been a staple of American cartoons has been how healthy a family they are. For all of their morbidness and macabre style, their indulgence in the frightful and decrepit, the gothic tastes and eccentric behaviour, they are a loving and happy family, cheerful and content despite how they are perceived by others. They’re always kind and well-intentioned, but always misunderstood as well, which of course carries tremendous allegorical weight. Thus, while initially created by Charles Addams as a satire of wealthy American families, the Addams Family has evolved into an endearing metaphor for celebrating diversity and difference.
One of the easiest ways to convey this is by setting the Addams against real society, or at least a Norman Rockwell facsimile of real society to emphasize the aesthetic contrast and ensuing conflict. Yet I don’t think a previous version of The Addams Family (or at least not in film form) has leaned quite so heavily into the Addams-as-immigrants metaphor as MGM’s animated movie from the directors of Sausage Party, which begins with the backstory of how the newlywed Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) moved into their isolated haunted mansion and subsequently deal with the bigotry of a nearby model town determined to assimilate them into their far creepier lifestyle of homogeneity.
Assimilation is the name of the gentrifying village and Allison Janney voices the controlling city planner because this is a movie that knows no concept of subtlety. But despite the modern conveniences, the plot-relevance of social media hearsay and burner accounts, The Addams Family retains much of the subversively thrilling spirit of the old cartoons, as well as the artistic style. The character designs are direct CG adaptations of their original looks, save for the occasional creative liberty (such as Wednesday’s noose-fashioned pigtails and deep rings under Pugsley’s eyes to make him look a little more demented). The whole world is similarly drawn to a particularly cartoonish degree with no consistency in the shape, size, and dimensions of the people and environments, which allows for a lot of freedom in the visuals, creative concepts and comedy. And unlike a lot of animated movies with similar flexibility, The Addams Family uses this style well, with a number of really good and clever jokes (there’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers gag at one point and a fun Bette Midler-Jenifer Lewis rivalry for Broadway nerds) and some remarkable visual humour (despite the occasional horrible pun) that are in perfect keeping with the sensibility of the property, if going never quite so far with the dark humour as the live-action Barry Sonnenfeld movies.
Indeed this film is in the shadow of those, its overt silliness in stark contrast to the comparatively bleak subject matter of the 90’s movies. Plot-wise it’s certainly more interesting, both of its major storylines revolving around coming-of-age experiences for the two children: Wednesdays’ (Chloe Grace Moretz) rebellious phase that sees her experiment with the customs of Assimilation and befriend a oppositionally rebellious girl (voiced by Eighth Grade’s Elsie Fisher), and Pugsley’s (Finn Wolfhard) preparation for a bar mitzvah-esque rite of passage that the whole extended family comes to witness. But as interesting as these are and the opportunities they present both for character experimentation and exploration of the varying family dynamics, it just can’t compare with those former movies, which could get by on their perfect casting and astounding production design alone. Their animation is wonderful, and Isaac and Theron lend terrific voices, but this Gomez and Morticia don’t have half the chemistry that Raul Julia and Anjelica Huston did.
Letting down the weight of any of these plot threads slightly is also that the sense of family isn’t particularly strong, the Addams’ and their relatives representing more a cultural group than a singular unit. Their point of difference is the key thing the movie wants to focus on as it codes them as immigrants or refugees, discriminated by a general public unaccustomed to such unusual people and personalities. In one scene, Gomez, the most “normal” of the Addams, goes into an ice cream shop where he attracts a lot of stares and expressions of shock from the patrons for what to a point can only be his thick Spanish accent -again this movie is not subtle. Undercutting the goodwill of this commentary however is the similar levels of distrust and disapproval Morticia imbues to Wednesday about the townspeople, effectively “both-sidesing” the xenophobic prejudice. I’m reminded of the similar tactics of Disney’s Pocahontas, which also played the “everybody’s racist” card to make it more palatable to white people. In fact the film comes close to having the Addams family actually fight an angry mob, which would betray their nature and hurt their metaphorical resonance.
These mixed messages and an unfortunate restraint on some of the gothic, grisly precepts in favour of being a broader, kid-friendly Halloween movie (the Sonenfeld films if you remember, were PG-13 back when it meant something) show off an Addams Family struggling with its own identity and what it wants to mean in 2019. And I’d be lying if I didn’t say some of the extreme character animation was ugly (notably an agent voiced by Tituss Burgess). It isn’t going to have the seasonal staying power of the Hotel Transylvania movies (its closest analogues) or certainly the 1991 film and its more insane sequel. But what charm it does have it wears proudly, and is good for some laughs and creative ideas. Neither creepy nor cooky, mysterious or spooky, The Addams Family is at least altogether ooky -whatever that even means.

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