“The Adventures of Tintin”… Raiders of the Lost Barque

As directors grow older, we expect that they’ll wind down like the rest of us, brushing aside logistically exhausting canvases for intimate portraits of the soul. But here’s Clint Eastwood, in his ninth decade, sketching the sprawl of early-twentieth-century America in the just-released J. Edgar. Martin Scorsese’s sixty-eighth year on this planet has been consumed by two mammoth undertakings – a densely detailed three-and-a-half hour documentary about George Harrison, and the forthcoming Hugo, painstakingly shot with 3-D cameras instead of being converted, in the post-production assembly line, from 2-D to 3-D. And Steven Spielberg, at 64 positively the baby of the bunch, has managed, once again within the same year, to multitask between the kind of prestige drama Oscar adores (the WWI-era based War Horse) and the kind of slick entertainer the box office loves (The Adventures of Tintin). It isn’t a stretch to imagine a writer past the middle of his life banging away at his keyboard in an effort to beget an epic novel, but epic cinema is so fraught with physical labour that you wonder why these directors still do it. Perhaps the better question is how they still do it.

At least with Spielberg, the motive behind The Adventures of Tintin reveals itself as an exuberant burst of nostalgia. For what is the boyish reporter of Hergé’s beloved comic series – trotting the globe in pursuit of mysteries – if not a continental cousin of Indiana Jones, his head capped with a quiff instead of a fedora? Within the first few pages of The Crab with the Golden Claws – one of the books that sourced this film; the others are The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure – Tintin hastens from his home in the city to a drug-running ship, after which he is found adrift in the middle of the ocean, from where he commandeers a hovering seaplane and crashes into a North African desert. In short, The Adventures of Tintin, with the hero and his cohorts on the trail of treasure from a sunken vessel, could just as easily have become an Indiana Jones movie: Raiders of the Lost Barque. And it has. As in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, there is an action sequence involving a motorcycle with a sidecar, and at the end, when a grave Nestor (Enn Reitel) invites the treasure-seekers into Marlinspike Hall, we are reminded of the gnarly knight who welcomed the adventurers who sought the Grail. Throw in the visual of a shooting star and a quasi-parental exchange between Tintin (Jamie Bell) and Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis), and you don’t need a film-studies degree to grasp that this is more Spielberg’s Tintin than Hergé’s.

But unless you’re a purist, the contamination of influences isn’t altogether a bad thing. The Adventures of Tintin is less a fluid feat of organically thought-out filmmaking than a well-oiled mechanical contraption designed to deliver precisely calibrated effects, and if it looks like something Spielberg could have dreamed up in his sleep, that’s still a lot more entertainment than what most other directors can manufacture while wide awake. From the moment we glimpse Haddock through a recently drained bottle of whiskey – and what better way to show off a souse? – Spielberg demonstrates that he hasn’t lost the sense of play from the days he was wrestling with a malfunctioning model shark. The action set pieces are a joy, combining cliffhanger scenarios with delirious slapstick, and the highlight is a chase through a city’s crowded streets that builds on climax after giddy climax. This boy’s-own spirit of imaginative invention is pure Spielberg, and it percolates through the film’s pores – down to the segues (like the conflation between a mirage and a flashback) and the throwaway shots, like the one where a passerby is knocked unconscious. When he comes around we see tiny birds circling his head, like in the panels of a comic. The joke is that they are real birds. A bird catcher soon steps into the frame brandishing a net.

The Adventures of Tintin begins beautifully, with a witty opening-credits sequence that serves, for the initiated, as a nostalgic scrapbook-tour through Tintin memorabilia. One of the destinations on an announcement board at a railway station is Gaipajama, and as the train gathers speed, we see in the background a chequered rocket whose destination is undoubtedly the moon. Even the names of cast and crew appear in the distinctively bold lettering of the titles in the comics. John Williams channels the spirit of Pink Panther-era Henry Mancini and doesn’t so much score over the credits as envelop them in a wistful European fragrance. (Later, of course, when film gets into gear, he reverts to his bad American habits, slathering triumphal “adventure music” onto the film’s every frame. Williams, with his scores for the Star Wars and Indiana Jones films, may have brought this type of soundtrack back into fashion for a new generation, but his hammy fanfares have now progressed to the point of parody.)

The performance-capture technology, which uses the movements and expressions of live actors as the basis for computer-generated simulations, takes a little getting used to, but it is just right. The film looks stunning, but that was only to be expected – with this crew, our jaws would have dropped only if it didn’t work. Early on, we see each strand of hair in Tintin’s quiff catch the breeze and come alive, waving like stalks of wheat in a golden field, and as he walks past a shop with mirrors, his reflections are exactly how they would appear from those angles. Yes, this is the technical team showing off, but no more than a ballerina balanced on a toe with supreme poise. They do it because they can, and we watch transfixed. Some of the transformations made me quibble – Nestor isn’t as perpetually pained as I think of him (he comes across as stolid), and surely Bianca Castafiore’s High Cs sprang from a more cavernous bosom – but the artistry is breathtaking to behold. But more importantly, more vitally, the technology comes across as morally right. Unlike other comic-book characters detailed with motive and musculature, Tintin is a creature of a two-dimensional universe, and the film may have been destroyed with live actors playing the parts. The delicate illusion would have been shattered. This technology, on the other hand, imparts just the right touch of eerie artifice – the characters are real, and yet not real; they look like flat-featured residents of Hergé’s universe, and yet they move lifelike through three-dimensional space. It’s like seeing a comic movie that honours the spirit of the comics as well as the spirit of the movies.

There is so much to enjoy in The Adventures of Tintin that it’s a shame the film is little more than a clothesline for set pieces. When Tintin and Co. aren’t swooping into lightning-forked thunderclouds or plunging into oceans, we are left with leaden time, and it’s because the characters are mere triumphs of technology. They have no spark, no soul. We never get a grip on Tintin, who remains a blandly eager cipher.  Hergé solved this problem by letting us hear him think – we followed his intuitive processes through thought bubbles. But here, the din of action drowns out all thought. Far more tragically, Haddock is just a man with a huge honker. (The honker, however, is exactly right.) A large part of the comedy in the Tintin comics comes from his insults – the result of inspired crossbreeding between marine life and made-up languages – and we imagined them as  spittle-flecked ejaculations. But here, a mouth-watering put-down like “yellow-bellied lily-livered sea slugs” is delivered like a dramatic declaration, as if it were a thoughtful line of dialogue. If there’s going to be a sequel, as the last scene promises, they’d do well to fill this sailor with spirit.

An edited version of this piece can be found here.

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Posted in: Cinema: English