All Intensive Purposes

Reviewing the new Curious George movie, the San Francisco Chronicle's Pop Culture Critic Peter Hartlaub writes:

Count me among the moviegoers who would be completely happy only with a George movie that gets the Frank Miller/"Sin City" treatment -- adapting H.A. and Margret Rey's seven books with a near-maniacal frame-by-frame faithfulness to the source material.

The "Curious George" feature film . . . makes only casual references to the books. But despite the modernization of the monkey who gets into mischief -- including a picture cell phone that becomes central to the plot -- George Version 2.0 isn't sacrilege, either. It's an entertaining movie for kids, which pays enough tribute to the original authors that "George" purists should forgive all but one or two of its transgressions.

Hartlaub ought to take another look at the books. Aesthetically, the movie will be familiar to anyone who knows the books, for a variety of reasons that Hartlaub goes on to discuss. But the books' moral content is gone.

In the books, because George is a monkey, he can get away from his parent figure, the Man in the Yellow Hat. George goes off on his own, and he misbehaves, as monkeys are wont to do. But he also gets the opportunity when he's off on his own to do something good, without anyone asking, and he does. Before the story ends, he returns to The Man in the Yellow Hat, and there is always a reckoning. George is admonished for his bad decisions and congratulated for his good ones.

In the movie, the plot's focus, and the moral focus, are Will Ferrell's Man in the Yellow Hat. Curious George has no voice; he is an object of our attention and affection, but he's no subject. He misbehaves, but there are never any consquences, because he's cute. And The Man in the Yellow Hat misbehaves, too, but there are never any consequences for him, either. He's a grown man, but he can take balloons from children at the zoo, and the movie's plot revolves around a miscommunication he fails to correct. We all worry that it will work out, but we never have to worry that he will do the right thing -- the old moral compass is nowhere to be found, and such fusty questions apparently are no longer entertained, or entertaining.

The movie is fine for what it is, but let's not pretend it's old-skool.