Do You Get It?

In today's New York Times, a cogent assessment by Dave Itzkoff on why Rowan Atkinson's almost-silent comic character Mr. Bean doesn't catch fire in the U.S. as he does around the rest of the world:

Mr. Bean Stumbles on Voyage Across Pond

I saw "Mr. Bean's Holiday" over the weekend and was happily surprised. Not at the physical comedy -- even if I didn't know what Mr. Bean does, the marketing campaign would have told me -- but at the heart-filling sweetness and optimism of the movie. The film's many flaws are wiped away by the squeegee of the actual story and what it says about the ridiculousness of life and how, if things tend to fall apart, there's no reason they can't fall back together again, better than before.

Maybe the marketers should have played up this side of "Mr. Bean's Holiday," at least a little. You see, throwing physical comedy into a dialog film is very American. But basing a movie exclusively on physical comedy, with almost no dialog from the protagonist, isn't American at all. It's actually sophisticated because the film becomes more of a haiku than a rollercoaster, a series of neat visual poems. You're asking the viewer to decide what makes Mr. Bean tick based solely on his actions. That's supposed to be good character structure, of course, but it's not in vogue in the American movie house. Next time you go to a movie -- even a well-reviewed one -- count how many times a character tells you who she is. Mr. Bean can't do that. He barely talks at all.

Rowan Atkinson is actually a lot more like Charlie Chaplin than many might realize. Like a Charlie Chaplin movie, the spine of a Mr. Bean adventure isn't the physical comedy. It's the definition of the world in which he lives. For the Little Tramp, that world was created out of the goodness of the tramp's heart. A rotten world could be made ripe again thanks to the tramp's perseverance. For Mr. Bean, that world seems to be benign despite himself, simply because his cause, stumbled upon, is nonetheless just.

I don't mean to make high tea out of this whole thing. But my wife and I took my three-year-old daughter to "Mr. Bean's Holiday," and it's through her eyes that I was moved. It was her first movie on the big screen (she saw "Cars," but she was too young and had to leave after fifteen seconds, so that doesn't count). At first she was worried at the bright colossus of the screen and and the tumult. Then she grew familiar with Mr. Bean's rubber face and settled in. That allowed her to follow the story, and since it involves a little boy, she related. When Mr. Bean did something stupid, she said, "Silly." And when things turned out all right, she said with a nod, "It's okay."

That's really all you can ask of a movie comedy. That it be silly, and that things turn out okay. It's a tall order, actually. Silly is hard. And if things really turn out okay, you don't see it, you feel it. How many movie comedies have you seen lately that made you feel something?

The sad news is, most Americans, for whatever reason, don't get Mr. Bean. His latest film opened to $10.1 million in our homeland. The good news is, in the rest of the world, it's made $188 million so far.

Good on ya, Mr. Bean.