The only movie hair higher than Tracy Turnblad's in Hairspray belongs to Marge Simpson, who brings the compound adjective "long-suffering" to new heights in The Simpsons Movie. Like Hairspray, it's not just a spinoff but a wised-up family comedy that's spirited and inventive. It retains the farcical belligerence of the TV comedy but also heightens the series' oddball warmth and expands on its Hellzapoppin' slapstick.
Marge's ravenous husband, Homer, moves at full destructive tilt, Bart carries on like a combination Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on a skateboard, and crusty, oblivious Grandpa spouts an apocalyptic vision that comes true. So the Simpson females - including the touchingly worthy Lisa and the magically prescient infant Maggie - must exert their benign influence and sanity to save their little piece of the world, the town of Springfield, which is like the good and the bad Bedford Falls of It's A Wonderful Life scrambled together and brought into the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton era.
No spoilers here - why ruin the party for fans who have waited 18 years to see their favorite animated characters on screen? The director, David Silverman, uses the wide screen to give expansive sweep (one is tempted to say grandeur) to trademark scenes, such as maddened townspeople marching on Homer in torch-lit mobs out of Frankenstein. And editor John Carnochan keeps the film deft and surprising right through the last credit.
"Even Homer nods," goes the famous aphorism about human fallibility, referring to the author of The Iliad. The key to this Homer is that he always nods. Yet his cluelessness about everything except his own immediate gratification catalyzes a Homeric odyssey. He will put his family and fellow citizens at dire risk, involve the U.S. government at the highest levels, taste all the beauty and mysticism of the great state of Alaska, and attain new if momentary levels of heroism and self-knowledge.
The Marx Brothers meet the Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1940s and 1950s: That's one way of describing what an A-team of producer-writers - including series creator Matt Groening and executive producer James L. Brooks - accomplishes with this crack and crackpot, volatile and virtuoso audiovisual tapestry. Sight gags and wordplay collide and pirouette; the jokes come at you from every speaker in the sound system and every inch of the screen.
The movie never loses the go-for-broke wit and high-low comedy of the TV show, and it also never seems inflated - except, perhaps, in the manner of an old MAD magazine zeppelin floating over the wreckage of contemporary American life. It's a cunningly plotted parody of disaster movies that gives insanity a form without losing the kick of all-out lunacy.
It maintains the TV series' topicality with a currency that rivals any episode's. There's ecology, obesity, the hollowness of American leadership, the rapacity of big corporations and the complacency and ignorance of the American public: No adult in Springfield, not even Marge, knows what EPA stands for. Every calamity has a SimpsonsSimpsons[From Page 1E]
place in the Simpsons' version of the family circus, and nothing seems forced, not even the ultimate triumph of family loyalty. Gluttonous, slothful Homer finds his perfect fantasy love object - a pig - and the whole movie follows from that, in a naturally unnatural way.
The series has always dared to depict Homer and Marge as part of the fallout from the remnants of '60s pop culture. They're like every conservative's nightmare of the loss of discipline and purpose that fell upon the American household in the past 40 years. But the makers of The Simpsons Movie adore Homer and his clan. And they shower the same mix of ridicule and affection on that opposite patriarch, Ned Flanders, who is so traditional and devout that when he sees a horrific multi-eyed mutant on a mountain trail, he praises the Lord for allowing him to witness the latest evidence of intelligent design. The movie pays deepest homage to Hair stage director Tom O'Horgan's 1969 production of Futz!, Rochelle Owens' play about a farmer who falls in love with a pig and wreaks havoc on his community. That's what Homer does here, too, but in ways that engage the attention of Environmental Protection Agency chief Russ Cargill (Albert Brooks), who calls himself "a rich man who wanted to give something back. Not the money but something."
The secret ingredients of The Simpsons Movie are humanity and reality. The tension between Flanders' genuine Christianity, complete with charity, generosity and fellow feeling, and Homer's id-centered selfishness has never been exploited for more cutting effect.
Humiliated by his dad once too often, Bart turns to Ned to discover the pleasures of a pat on the back or a cup of hot cocoa. The film displays heart without going soft: Its humor is rooted in observation, like the way Ned builds that cocoa, from the steaming liquid and the whipped cream and wafer to a marshmallow, toasted, on top.
The Simpsons Movie is the marshmallow on top of this honorable, infectious franchise. The inspired vocal cast members, nearly all playing multiple roles, hit their comic beats and heartbeats simultaneously, whether Lisa is falling in love with an Irish boy who shares her devotion to music and the environment or Marge is wondering whether she can save her marriage.
Homer, of course, is the key. Without an ounce of cant or moralizing, The Simpsons Movie teaches him (and us) that no man is an island, even if he's as big as one.
michael.sragow@baltsun.com