Cinema: Him Tarzan, Him Great

Bill Clinton is a canny player of political poker. In criticizing movies for their grossness, as he has in the wake of Littleton and other teen tragedies, Clinton is playing his Dan Quayle card. It’s not the wrong card, but it is a low one. You can ask for movies to be gentler, a tiny bit more attentive to the power of the repeated image over the young. But after criticizing what’s there, think about what’s missing. Can we please have a little grandeur and depth in movies? Not of armies on parade or edifying soap operas, but of stories that touch our essential humanity, told with care and flair. Is it possible for a film to resonate in a billion heads at once, hooking adults as intensely as fairy tales once mesmerized kids? Can we have a film that is smart, pure and funny and, just by the way, a little profound?

We have one now. Tarzan, the new Disney animated feature, is the best news to hit cartooning, and perhaps Hollywood, in ages. It is the full-service, romance-and-adventure, laugh-and-cry movie that Disney and its new competitors have been trying to make, without quite succeeding, since The Lion King five summers ago.

This is brisk, epic storytelling. Like a shaman in a village circle, the film spins the old saga, made familiar in the Edgar Rice Burroughs books and nearly 50 films, but with a fresh and affecting power. Now it is a safari into the interior of Tarzan’s conflicted soul, where he searches not so much for his mate Jane as for his place in a society of men and apes. Though it would be nuts to predict Lion King-size revenues (that film and its ancillary markets made Disney $1 billion in profit), it is also hard to believe the mass audience will find Tarzan resistible. In its pace, wit and poignancy, this is the movie The Phantom Menace should have been.

Disney could use a hit; lately, the company has mostly been taking them. Profits are down, partly because of the slump in popularity of the post-Lion King animated features (and hence of the ancillary videos and merchandise). The company’s stock is down too, losing 25% of its value in the past bull-market year. Costs have zoomed: a billion here for the Animal Kingdom theme park, $700 million there for a couple of cruise ships–eventually it adds up. And for months CEO Michael Eisner has been on the defensive in a suit brought by Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran the film studio until he was pushed out in 1994, for a share of the company’s profits. That could cost $500 million. After a palmy decade, Walt’s successors are finding it’s a jungle out there.

Tarzan to the rescue! If not fiscally, then artistically. From the first images, the picture chest-thumps its narrative expertise. A shipwreck brings the baby Tarzan’s parents to the jungles of East Africa; they die violently in a leopard attack; a baby gorilla is killed by the same leopard, Sabor; the grieving gorilla mother Kala (voiced by Glenn Close) discovers the humans’ corpses and their living child; she saves the child from Sabor and decides to rear the human as her own; Kala’s mate Kerchak (Lance Henriksen) gruffly, suspiciously accedes to her wish. All this–basically, the start of Robinson Crusoe and the Moses story–is told in a few minutes, with the deftest narrative brushstrokes.

Directors Kevin Lima and Chris Buck, writers Tab Murphy, Bob Tzudiker and Noni White and the myriad artists at their command have taken the familiar Tarzan iconography–vine swinging, Jane, Cheetah, the jungle yodel–then freshened or deepened it. This ape-man (animated by Glen Keane and voiced by Tony Goldwyn) is no longer a swinger; he rides the twisting highways of tree boughs like the coolest surfer. (Alert, all Disney park ride designers: have the Tarzan Twist ready by next spring.)

Jane is still the proper young Englishwoman abroad, but she and Tarzan are naifs in each other’s worlds, with resources of strength and feelings still to discover. And with Minnie Driver adroitly mining each nuance of social primness, Jane is the first Disney cartoon heroine to provide her own comic relief.

What can be done with Cheetah? Replace that nattering chimp with gorillas who are all too human. This is a film about parenting, about the pain and triumph of racial or social assimilation. Kala is a loving adoptive mother, her concern for the boy complicated by the loss of her own child and the knowledge that his difference, when he finally does understand it, may force him from her. To Kerchak, Tarzan is a threat: a wiser form of machismo. And to the brash young Terk (Rosie O’Donnell), Tarzan is just another playmate–weird, but who isn’t?

The Tarzan yell might seem the most superficial accessory, but the filmmakers see it as a key to the drama. They never let us forget that the lad is isolated, unaware of his origin and his destiny–and aware that he is unaware. He places his palm against Kala’s paw (hands are a major motif in the film) and knows that his mother is different; or, rather, she is the norm, and he the outsider. Africa is his metaphor: the lost continent is his identity. Always he asks, Who or what am I? Where do I belong?

The boy Tarzan is determined to “be the best ape ever.” Frustrated that he can’t growl exactly like his ape friends, he is advised by Kala to “just come up with your own sound.” He does, and he likes it. The Tarzan yell is a shout of young maturity, of his interspecies uniqueness. But later, when he falls in love with Jane yet feels obliged to stay with his ape family to protect them, the yell carries a wrenching pathos. It is the primal scream of someone who doesn’t know if he’s man or monkey.

We don’t mean to frighten the kids; Tarzan is not Oedipus Rex. It’s a Disney coming-of-age comedy-drama in Lion King territory, with five radio-friendly tunes written and sung by Phil Collins. It has a standard villain: a grating white hunter (whose musculature nicely mimics Kerchak’s, thus suggesting their similarity as imperfect male role models for the boy). It has a reeeeally cute baby baboon. It enfolds our hero in a dream jungle, painted in the lushest of sherbetty forest colors and shot in a new, virtual 3-D format called Deep Canvas that vivifies the scenes. Its set pieces (Tarzan swipes a tail hair from Tantor the elephant, fights Sabor to the death, studies human history and teaches Jane how to sail through the jungle) are models of economy, energy, subtlety, heart.

Tarzan is a movie to restore a proud tradition of popular art. And it gives the Disney company something to yell about. From the treetops, in triumph.