A look at what's right (and what's wrong) with today's screenplays

It’s a bold move to make a movie with an unsympathetic protagonist. We in the audience are expected to see the world through the eyes of the main character — and to feel it through his (or her) heart. But would you like to become Ted Bundy, Timothy McVeigh or Ken Lay, even just for a couple hours? Most people might not be able to experience the emotions that drive characters like those at all… and if they could, they’d probably rather not find out. That’s why something like three out of every two phrases you’ll hear in Hollywood are “likable protagonist,” “sympathetic lead role” or “relatable main character.” After all, nobody ever went broke underestimating the bravery of the American public.

So I have to give major props to the creative forces behind Mr. Brooks and Ratatouille for defying convention. (And yes, I really am drawing a parallel between Mr. Brooks and Ratatouille. Just bear with me; it’ll all make sense in a minute.) Unfortunately, I also have to take a lot of the points I give them with one hand away with the other, because in the end, they both chickened out. Mr. Brooks, as you probably know, is about a serial killer played by Kevin Costner, and Ratatouille not only stars a rat, it stars a French rat named Remy who desperately wants to become a chef at a five-star restaurant. Talk about unrelatable! In each case, though, very possibly because someone with power over the purse strings was afraid audiences couldn’t or wouldn’t relate, we also get another, more overtly likable character as an emergency backup target for our sympathies. In Brooks it’s the cop played by Demi Moore, and in Ratatouille, it’s the hapless human Linguini, who also dreams of being a chef, but who doesn’t have even a fraction of Remy’s talent.

The problem is that these extra quasi-protagonists have the exact opposite of their intended effect. As I explained in another blog entry a week or two ago, the contrast between Earl Brooks and Detective Atwood makes Brooks seem less sympathetic than he would have been without her. The likable shmo Linguini does the same thing to Remy the rat, but Ratatouille has another problem on top of that: Linguini actually takes over the story for awhile, leaving Remy in limbo. In fact, at one point it’s not completely clear whose story Ratatouille is telling — and that’s extra-deadly when one of your leads has glowing red eyes, sharp teeth and jagged, spiky fur. Linguini is made even more relatable (and more damaging to audience investment in Remy) by the addition of the Colette subplot. (Colette is the assistant chef Linguini falls for.) Romantic longing is one of the most appealing and sympathetic traits a character can have… and it goes to Linguini rather than to Remy. I’m not saying Linguini should’ve been cut entirely; being a rat, Remy needed someone to help him in the kitchen. But Ratatouille wasn’t Linguini’s story, and it shouldn’t have ever seemed like it was.

For those of you who still think that Atwood and Linguini were necessary as full third-wheel protagonists because Brooks and Remy just weren’t sympathetic enough, rent As Good As It Gets. Melvil Udall (played by Jack Nicholson) is one of the most obnoxious and detestable protagonists to come down the pike in a long time, and yet the movie made almost $150M domestic and won a couple Oscars for its leads. That’s because Mark Andrus and James L. Brooks took care to balance Melvin’s unappealing characteristics with plenty of ones that we could understand and relate to. To be fair, Brad Bird et al did much the same with Remy — he has a dream he’s determined to fulfill, he feels unappreciated by his family and painfully out of place with his own kind, he’s very good at something he cares a lot about, and so on — but they didn’t quite have the courage of their convictions. Or, as I suggested earlier, someone else took their courage away from them. And that’s too bad, because both films would’ve been a lot stronger and more successful if they’d stood foursquare behind their protagonists instead of trying to be all things to all people.

P.S. Don’t get me wrong; Brad Bird is one of my favorite filmmakers, and for for all its flaws, Ratatouille is great stuff, easily my third-favorite Pixar film behind The Incredibles and Monsters, Inc. Unfortunately, it’s also my third favorite Brad Bird film, and he’s made only three.

There’s a bit of a double meaning in the title of this entry; on one hand, it refers to Alien³, which is my official subject today, and on the other, it’s a sharply-worded reprimand to myself about how I’ve ignored you lately, since I’ve committed the cardinal sin of blogging and neglected my readers for something like 70 weeks now. (70 weeks in hyperactive supercharged faster-than-light-speed dog years, anyway… but still.) So please accept my abject, humble and utterly self-effacing apologies. I’m very, very sorry, and I promise I won’t ever let it happen again… until next time, anyway. My excuse is that some very exciting developments may be developing in the other half of my life (the one in which I wear a writer-director’s hat) and they’ve taken up ridiculous amounts of my time and prevented me from going to the theater or even watching any DVDs, but excuses are just excuses, like they say, not worth the breath they’re made with.

So anyway, Alien and Aliens are both great and widely-beloved movies, numbers 52 and 68 in the IMDb’s Top 250 as of this writing, but Alien³ was a critical and commercial dud and has an IMDb rating of only 6.4. People have debated what went wrong for years, but the biggest single reason is that James Cameron did an extraordinary job of emotionally attaching us to the ad-hoc family unit of Ripley, Hicks and Newt in Aliens, and then Fox went and spat in the faces of every last audience member who cared by killing Hicks and Newt in the very opening moments of Alien³— and doing it offscreen, no less! It was one of the most astonishingly short-sighted and self-destructive decisions I’ve ever seen in the movie business, and that’s saying a lot.

The point is really very simple. If you toy with audience expectations, if you don’t give them what they want and expect, play fair. People will respect and appreciate your work even if you give them a nasty surprise as long as they realize in retrospect that they could have (and maybe should have) seen what was coming. The deaths of Hicks and Newt, though, amounted to the studio saying “oh, right, they got hit by a car and died… so anyway, how about Bobby and Sue getting married — who saw that coming?” Trust me; you don’t ever want to be that rude when writing your script. You’re trying to get your readers (and ultimately your audience) emotionally invested in your characters and your story. The very last thing you should do is betray that investment and make people feel stupid for caring.