December 25, 2002 | Roberto Benigni’s Pinocchio is such a ghastly misfire, such a charmless and witless waste of film, you can easily understand why Miramax refused to advance-screen it for critics, and why the distributor waited until Christmas Day to dump the movie into megaplexes, much like Santa Claus might place lumps of coal in the stockings of naughty children.
This live-action version of Carlo Collodi’s classic story about a sentient puppet who longs to be human is, to put it charitably, ill-conceived. To put it less charitably, the movie is an egregious fiasco, appearing at once laughably tatty and ludicrously overproduced as it desperately encompasses a cluttered jumble of visual and narrative influences — everything from Walt Disney to Federico Fellini, from Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade to second-rate road-company operetta. The glaringly maladroit English dubbing, which makes the unfortunate cast of this Italian-produced film appear even sillier, is the final nail in the coffin.
Chalk it up as the worst kind of hubristic folly. Benigni, the hyperactive multi-hyphenate who triumphed with the sublimely seriocomic Life is Beautiful, made his first mistake when he cast himself in the lead role. That’s right: He looked in the mirror, saw a 50-year-old guy with a receding hairline, and said, “Aha! There’s my Pinocchio!”
Then, to compound the miscalculation, he donned a harlequin costume and a pointed hat, all the better to make himself appear more…. Well, gee, I don’t know. Lovable? Elfin? Childlike?
Unfortunately, Benigni looks precisely like what he is, a middle-aged guy in a clown outfit and a funny hat. As he bounces off walls, hops across co-stars and scampers spastically to and fro, he runs the gamut from embarrassing to appalling. (He’s dubbed by American actor Breckin Meyer, who sounds distractingly like a young Michael J. Fox.) What he doesn’t do — what he never does, at any point in the entire picture — is resemble a marionette. Whenever Benigni’s Pinocchio expresses his longing to be “a real little boy,” he comes off as delusional, if not totally deranged.
And whenever any of the supporting characters refers to him as a wood-based life form — as in “Get that puppet out of here!” — you can’t help wondering if these folks are as vision-impaired as the co-stars who couldn’t spot Barbra Streisand as a badly disguised girl in Yentl.
Benigni dutifully follows the plotline of Collodi’s original story, introducing familiar incidents and characters (the woodcarving Geppetto, the disapproving Cricket, the miraculous Blue Fairy, etc.) with all the rote efficiency of someone ticking items off a checklist. But here’s no magic in the enterprise, and no trace of a personal approach or unique interpretation.
You don’t have to compare this disaster to the classic Disney cartoon to underscore Benigni’s failings as director, star and co-screenwriter. You can simply scour your friendly neighborhood video store for The Adventures of Pinocchio, a 1996 live-action version with Jonathan Taylor-Thomas and Martin Landau, to find a much better retelling of the tale.
For the record: Glenn Close speaks for the Blue Fairy (played by Nicoletta Braschi, Benigni’s wife and frequent collaborator), John Cleese provides the prissy voice of Cricket, and other characters are dubbed by such notables as Eric Idle, James Belushi, Queen Latifah and David Suchet (who does double duty as Geppetto and the movie’s narrator). But none of this helps very much.
