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  1. Culture
7 February 2012updated 05 Oct 2023 8:39am

Gilbey on Film: We need to talk about Kermit

A triumphant cinematic return for the Muppets.

By Ryan Gilbey

A triumphant cinematic return for the Muppets.

Aside from nostalgia, the primary responses to the generally encouraging quality of the new Muppets picture have been surprise and relief. But why?No other series with the exception of the Carry On films has maintained a comparably high standard over such a long period of time.

There may have been a slight falling-off in the late 1990s with Muppets from Space, and I can’t vouch for the occasional TV films (such as a Muppet version of The Wizard of Oz), which I haven’t seen. But elsewhere the various filmmakers and brand custodians over the years have been responsible for inventive entertainment that is never shy of breaking the fourth wall. Until The Muppet Movie in 1979, the customary route for TV shows transferring to cinema had been to spin out a typical 30-minute episode to triple the length, with little regard for the demands and contours of the larger medium. But the Muppets’ movie outings justify themselves fully as pieces of cinema, building their gags and narratives around our familiarity with the form.

The new picture is called, simply and cleanly, The Muppets — thank goodness the makers of this “reboot” didn’t go for Muppets Begin or Muppets: Fully Loaded. The songs by Flight of the Conchords star Bret McKenzie are suitably infectious, if not quite equal to the earworms composed for The Muppet Movie and Muppet Christmas Carol by the Bugsy Malone songwriter Paul Williams.

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The rudimentary getting-the-gang-back-together plot begins with Walter, a Muppet, seeing The Muppet Show on television and finally discovering what makes him different from his (human) best friend (played by Jason Segel, who also co-wrote the script). It’s a coming-out story in essence — a metaphor for realising that you are not alone in the world after all — but the movie doesn’t labour that point. Instead it sticks to the Muppet films’ overarching commandment: Thou shalt not waste any opportunity to remind the audience it is watching a movie. So the road-trip which forms a large chunk of the picture is completed more quickly when the characters opt to travel “by map” (remember the red line inching across the page of an atlas in the Indiana Jones series?), while someone suggests that the lengthy recruitment of all the old Muppets back into the fold might be experienced more enjoyably in montage form.

This self-reflexiveness has long been the way of the Muppets. Remember The Great Muppet Caper from 1982? No, of course you don’t: that’s why I’m here, to remember it for you. There’s a whole production number outlining the characters that the Muppets will be playing in the film we’re about to see, and lots of dotty dialogue spoofing storytelling conventions. (“Why are you telling me this?” Miss Piggy asks after a particularly clunky speech by her another character. “It’s exposition,” comes the reply. “It’s got to go somewhere.”)

The Muppet Movie even begins with the cast gathering in a private screening room to watch The Muppet Movie. (At one point, the print burns up, Persona-style.) When the musicians from the Electric Mayhem catch up with Kermit and Fozzie in the desert, they are able to do so only because Kermit had given them a copy of the screenplay earlier in the film — all they had to do was flick forward to page 57 (“Exterior. Desert. Night”). The adventure leads to Hollywood, where a studio head (played by Orson Welles — who else?) asks his secretary to prepare “the standard ‘rich and famous’ contract” for the assorted felt animals who have crowded into his office. The Muppet Movie ends with the Muppets beginning work on The Muppet Movie — the film we are watching. Far from being self-indulgent, the device works magically to draw the cinema audience closer.

Such playfulness has its echo throughout the NBC sitcom-about-nothing Seinfeld, and especially in Season 4, which is devoted to Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld) and George (Jason Alexander) trying to get their sitcom-about-nothing made at NBC. (Some of the story ideas they pitch are lifted from earlier episodes of the show.) It’s there too in the work of Charlie Kaufman, particularly Synecdoche, New York (about a playwright mounting a scale version of his own life) and Adaptation, which stars Nicolas Cage as Kaufman and shows fictionalised scenes from the set of the writer’s previous film, Being John Malkovich. Bravely, the film itself also turns into the same artistically compromised screenplay that Kaufman is shown writing — a point missed by those critics who complained that the movie sold out in its final stretch.

The Muppets is a good example of the tradition of TV-oriented comic reboots which includes The Brady Bunch Movie, Starsky and Hutch and the forthcoming 21 Jump Street; it also has a slight head-start over those titles because its irreverence is already deep in its DNA. (It may be a reboot but it isn’t a makeover.) I wonder where the series could go next; the excellent Muppet Christmas Carol, an affectionate and faithful adaptation of Dickens, and the almost-as-good Muppet Treasure Island, suggested that the form was particularly well-suited to adapting other texts. Glancing at my own bookshelves for ideas doesn’t prove especially fruitful. The Muppet Who Fell From Grace with the Sea? A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Muppet? We Need to Talk About Kermit?

“The Muppets” is released on Friday.

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