Is it possible to be bored in a giant, magic toy store? Writer-director Zach Helm proves it is with this sludgy, colorful mess…
Last year’s Stranger Than Fiction, in which the world of Will Ferrell’s unimaginative, fuddy-duddy accountant got turned upside down when he discovered he was the serial fictional character of an English novelist set on finally killing him off, drew mostly positive notices for screenwriter Zach Helm, in his feature film debut. In Helm’s first foray behind the camera, it’s the world of Jason Bateman’s unimaginative, fuddy-duddy accountant that gets turned upside down when he’s drafted to bring into line the financial affairs of the 243-year-old owner of a magical toy shop.
Instead of tweaking narrative convention in delightful ways, however, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium simply plays like some meandering, bastard love child of Toys, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland. Its twee, self-satisfied colorfulness outstripped only by its sloppy form and thin characterizations, the film does the unthinkable — it delivers a boring trip to the toy store, making one yearn for the rigid strictures of adulthood over the unbridled imagination of adolescence.
Dustin Hoffman stars as Edward Magorium, a bushy-browed oddball who lives with a zebra and is the proprietor of an extraordinary shop which houses all manner of fantastical playthings. Children love it, obviously (even Kermit shops there, for what it’s worth), especially the personable, pint-sized Eric Applebaum (Zach Mills), an avid collector of hats who has no friends, and hangs around like he’s Norm from Cheers.
A couple centuries old, and for no other reason than he’s on his last pair of shoes, Magorium decides it’s finally time to hand off the reins to the store to his manager, Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman), a 23-year-old piano aficionado who feels adrift and listless. To that end, Magorium begins planning for his chosen date of terminal exit by bringing in Henry Weston (Bateman), a straight-laced accountant with a creativity deficit. The store itself, meanwhile, doesn’t spark to Magorium’s departure, and starts exhibiting signs of petulance and noncompliance, namely through a slow drain of color and decreased whimsicality.
The film’s list of confounding elements is a long one. First off, we don’t learn enough about Mr. Magorium to really identify with Molly’s distress about his planned departure. Apart from the fact that it provides for a few cute puns and asides (why, he’s made toys for Napoleon Bonaparte and Abraham Lincoln), we don’t know anything about Magorium’s fantastical age, or why he got into toy-making/selling. When Molly protests that she can’t run the store because she doesn’t know how, and besides, his name rhymes, that tells us about everything we really know about Magorium. He’s a symbol, not a character; he might as well be called Creative Eccentric.
Similarly, Molly’s own “crossroads moment” is puzzling (does she really want to be a concert pianist, or are her musical noodlings merely a generic creative placeholder for early-twentysomething ennui?) and young Eric is an outcast only because the script dictates it. None of these characters are particularly deeply sketched, and consequently we don’t feel any fire in their decisions and dilemmas, or attachment to their plights.
Most damningly, though, apart from some of the production design and sets, neither is Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium infused with enough of a sense of wide-eyed wonderment to make one forget about all these pesky, nagging questions of back story and such. It sounds downright silly to say about a film like this that nothing makes sense, but the logic on display here is of come-what-may lackadaisicalness.
Even if Tim Burton’s 2005 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — another movie about an arrested-development eccentric seeking out an informal inheritor — felt a bit emotionally isolated, it at least had an undeniable authorial authenticity. Helm’s leaden directorial touch is so passive and yawningly uninvolved that you’d be hard-pressed to believe Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium was written and directed by the same person. That said, its problems extend from screen to page, and back again.
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