A welcome presence on the big screen

I am sure that a lot of you parents out there have already taken the kids to watch Garfield: The Movie, the big screen rendering of the Jim Davies comic strip about the fat cat who loves to eat lasagna. Comic strips are supposed to be funny and kids like to laugh especially at things animated so you expected them to laugh at Garfield the way they do at Mickey Mouse. By now, you must have also found out that they didn’t. They didn’t laugh at Garfield. What they liked best about the movie was the dog that can dance on his hind legs.

But then while I admit that most of us chuckle over three frames of Garfield in the newspaper funnies every morning, we must already know by now that Garfield is not to be laughed at. His adventures, most of them about his life with his human Jon and the other pet, a dog named Odie, have been running for more than 20 years now. The most you do is smile and only a little at that, at yourself because Garfield has again done what you have thought about doing but couldn’t put into words. Also to himself, of course, Garfield never talks. He has the best put downs you have ever imagined.

Garfield, in the movie directed by Pete Hewitt, is everything we ever thought he should be. As a character, he is what is best described as flawed. He is an anti-hero who is smug, lazy, selfish, egotistical, even cruel at times and whatever humor he has is the sarcastic sort. I suppose he is typical of cats famous for being independent creatures who do not aim to please. Whether a pampered Persian or an alley resident, they maintain an air of superiority that leaves us humans perplexed.

Perplexed though is not what Garfield would use to describe Jon, his owner and primary caregiver. Garfield thinks he is worse than that. Clueless, dense and miserable because he has been dateless for many years, Jon is the classic newspaper on the head, pie-on-the-face simpleton. When together, Garfield and Jon are Laurel and Hardy or Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and what we laugh at is not the cat.

Although he is also a comedian, Bill Murray’s kind of humor does not elicit roars of laughter. He loves playing unlikeable characters. Like Garfield. In fact, he can be annoying in ridiculous situations. He has also mastered some expressions that convey the sarcastic putdown to perfection like a raise of an eyebrow, a twitch of his nose or a crooked smile. Very much like Garfield. If Garfield could talk it would be with a world-weary drawl. Just like Murray. Remember him in Lost in Translation? And hearing Garfield talk to the audience with Murray’s voice makes for one brilliant piece of casting.

Garfield: The Movie is not likely to land among the great accomplishments in modern filmmaking technology. Still, it cannot be denied that the combination of a computer animated Garfield and live actors, including a real dog to bring the story to life made the film more convincing. This tells us that Garfield is a cat who is not really a real cat in a real world. That is why he converses only with the audience. That is what the cloudlike balloons in his dialogue box mean. He is really a fantasy figure who is a commentator on the foibles of human beings and he articulates the mataray thoughts we prefer to squash, when we can, because we were brought up to be nice to others.

Of course, since this is a movie, there has to be a plot and the characters have to evolve into better beings for the happy ending that should please the kiddies. So, while a Garfield comic strip ends with a punch line, the film has a story about Jon played by Breckin Meyer falling in love and being loved in return by a pretty vet played by Jennifer Love Hewitt and of Garfield saving Odie from a cruel dog-napper, a TV talk show host named Happy Chapman. Not very Garfield. Nothing earthshaking about it either. I do say that the producers should have worked harder on the story department.

But all that we wanted from the movie anyway was to see Garfield on the screen. Who cares if he is only computer generated? He is really quite a piece of work who can give Puss in Boots of Shrek 2 a big run for his money. In this case, we do get our money’s worth. Garfield is now immortalized on film, fat and orange, lazy and sleepy, eating too much lasagna, being everything we believe we humans want to be.