I wonder if Remarkably Bright Creatures would exist without My Octopus Teacher, the Oscar-winning documentary that came out two years before Shelby Van Pelt published her bestseller novel. The interest both take in the octopus and specifically anthropomorphizing it as some wise creature benignly interacting with the affairs of everyday people is a link that doesn’t feel entirely incidental. And now with a movie adaptation out directed by Olivia Newman, who was also behind another movie translation of a book club favourite, it’s even easier to see those linking tentacles. In spare moments at least. Because though he is an omniscient figure, narrating the story through cool, dispassionate ruminations provided by Alfred Molina, the octopus Marcellus isn’t so significant a part of the movie here. Yet I suspect Remarkably Bright Creatures would have been much better if he had been.
Distributed directly to Netflix, the film stars Sally Field as Tova, an elderly cleaning lady at a small aquarium in a coastal Washington state town where she has lived much of her life. With no partner and having tragically lost a son many years ago, she finds a sense of friendship with Marcellus whom she confides with and gossips to. Her age and a sprained ankle prompts the necessity of training somebody else as the aquarium cleaner, and that winds up being a drifter called Cameron (Lewis Pullman), in search of a long-lost father.
Marcellus’s intermittent commentary often adopts the tone of a mildly curious though often bored observer to the lives and problems of these humans in his orbit, and he is very much an accurate audience avatar in this respect -whether intentionally or not Molina aces the assignment. The narrative here is very slight, the motivations behind both human protagonists not terribly interesting, and their world is a little too slow and quiet, even with other figures occasionally involving themselves in the narrative like Tova’s loose friend group ‘the Knit-Wits’ (one of whom is played by an underutilized Joan Chen), and respective love interests for Cameron and Tova in surfer girl Avery (Sofia Black-D’Elia) and local grocer Ethan (Colm Meaney). By far though the movie’s biggest priority is in the mismatched dynamic between Tova and Cameron destined to blossom into a genuinely warm friendship. And it is a story arc that should be relatively easy to invest in. Field and Pullman are both likeable performers -Field especially has a long catalogue of endearingly spunky characters such as this- and there is ample opportunity for them to work off each other well.
Yet their chemistry is muted by the script, and what warmth they genuinely share is obscured by cliché tendencies and missed opportunities. A good example is a car ride together where Cameron, a musician, is pleasantly surprised to find a Grateful Dead cassette tape and insists on playing it only for Tova to be extremely uncomfortable with that -an indicator perhaps of some trauma associated with that music but which is never actually confirmed, and a potential bonding moment is averted. What attachments do form are largely superficial, motivated strictly by movie logic of a lonely old woman and a lost young man becoming friends for its own sake.
Both actors put in the work, and Field especially recalls some of her classic attributes in the emotional places she goes to, but the characterization of the melodrama doesn't support its own weight. The issues, especially facing Cameron, feel rather mild -one of his hang-ups ultimately revolving around Avery having kids set against his own insecurity given his lack of a father. Played more smartly or intently such a beat might work, but Avery vanishes from the story after this reveal until the resolution. Meanwhile his search for his father gets progressively more emotional, but not any more compelling -his response to a friend of his mother whom he mistakes for his dad just feels awkward. Tova’s own grief, which she’s been carrying for decades, and anxieties around leaving her job likewise fail to connect in an authentic way, especially with little context provided for her son.
Something that isn’t much a factor in either of their emotional journeys, nor even their time together, is Marcellus -narrator and presumably a chief character for this story. Tova’s relationship to him is supposedly especially important, given all the years she has cared for and tended to him as a not so subtle surrogate for her own son (and of course leaving the job behind means finally having to let go on multiple levels). But apart from the friendliness, talking to him and that general anthropomorphizing of his tendencies and emotions, there’s not really any dynamic there to invest in -especially with Marcellus himself insisting on an ambivalent attitude towards humans meant to be an obvious disguise for real affection, but which doesn’t honestly come across in the excerpts from his mind. And nowhere do we see either Tova or Cameron bonding with the octopus in a manner that would mean something. There are a couple small references to Free Willy in this film, but nothing approximating a heartfelt interest in its central animal.
Though I suppose Marcellus is not this film’s central animal. The title, as you might guess, is revealed to refer to Tova and Cameron (or humans more broadly) as the “remarkably bright creatures”. A sappy sentiment, no less so in context, and one that again is odd in the context of the minuscule relationship between Marcellus and these humans. The allusion that they confide in him is enough to exclude him from large portions of the movie yet still know exactly what is going on. His care remains an important facet of the story and why Tova is reluctant to leave, but his function is otherwise not very tangible and he seems to largely be just a gimmicky mascot. And the movie clearly could use more of him to strengthen that tension for Tova or perhaps symbolize some kind of purpose or value for Cameron. There is a sense that these are the aims -perhaps in the book they are- but they are not translated, and we don’t get to see as a result a lot of the octopus’s life and world. Apart from his distrust of an eel in a neighbouring tank.
Seeing Field and Pullman try to make the most out of a thin and hollow script, and Newman failing to present it in a compelling way is a bit dispiriting. This is a book that has spent many months on the bestsellers list -surely there is something to it to make it so popular. But whatever that is evades this movie, which I feel is going to be missed by many of that book’s fans even by virtue of its fairly anonymous release on Netflix. But if they were to discover it, I don’t know if it would mean much to them, outside of those tangible though vain efforts. There are few Remarkably Bright Creatures here.
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/JordanBosch
Follow me on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jordanbosch.bsky.social
Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/jbosch
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jordan_D_Bosch
Comments
Post a Comment