Director: Joel Zwick
Writers: Bill Cosby, Charles Kipps
Cast: Kenan Thompson, Kyla Pratt, Dania Ramirez, Shedrack Anderson III, Aaron Frazier, Marques Houston, Alphonso McAuley, Keith Robinson, Jermaine Williams
Runtime: 93 mins.
2004
I want to get the meat of this review out of the way efficiently so I can spend time in some more abstract speculation that has been plaguing me since my viewing of Fat Albert.
Fat Albert is a mid-2000s film that brings the iconic 70's cartoon to live action. The adaptation of cartoon to live action happens quite literally: When Doris (Kyla Pratt) gets home after a hard day at school and sheds a tear onto the TV remote while she's watching reruns of Fat Albert, a portal opens up that allows Fat Albert (Kenan Thompson) and his squad to travel through the screen into our reality. Mr. Albert is dead set on helping Doris with her problems, one of which becomes dealing with this group of oversized characters until she can get them back into their program when it runs again at 2:30pm tomorrow.
The sad truth about Fat Albert is that it gives us a hell of a lot to enjoy right away, then strips every enjoyable aspect away one by one until we are left bereft and impatient for the film to limp to its conclusion. The most joyful stretch of the movie is the half hour or so after the gang emerges from the television. The very best scene is when Doris, at a loss for how to entertain these strange interlopers, offers them all some soda. To access the soda they have to learn how to use pop tabs to open their cans. The film takes its time in showing us a half dozen grown men opening soda cans with intense focus. They begin to replicate the pssh sound with mouth noises, then launch seamlessly into an a cappella performance of their theme song. The ensemble work is tremendous, and the playfulness is exactly what we want to see from a movie about cartoon characters come to life.
Fat Albert has a huge asset in its performers, especially when those performers are allowed to bounce off each other. The best jokes in the film come from the way the gang occupies space. In animation, seven bodies can occupy the screen without much fuss or distraction, because the framing and character motion are so tightly controlled. But when you translate that to live action, seven bodies is a lot to frame at the same time, especially adorned in such bright primary colors. The gang moves through space as one huge masculine mass of bubbly energy. The effect is that Fat Albert and his crew dominate any space that they enter, making it delightful when they do something as simple as walking down the street.
Such a shame to waste such a good thing. Seemingly unsure of what to do with its ensemble, the rest of the film splits them up, sends half of them home, and gives the rest atrocious pantomimes of character arcs. Two of them even develop high school love interests, including Albert himself, which exposes exactly how ill-equipped Kenan Thompson is to carry the film when his ensemble isn't around. So we get scene after scene of Albert courting what may be one of the most vapidly-written women I have ever seen onscreen. These scenes are buffered by boring track meets, lame fish out of water jokes, uneventful updates from the cartoon world, and a lengthy hip hop remake of the Fat Albert theme song plunked artlessly down for us to behold in embarrassment. Oh yes, they even manage to squeeze in an especially soul-crushing rendition of the 'changing room at the mall' montage.
For all the world it seems as if Fat Albert initially set out to do something fresh, then crumpled into all the most cliche demands of a Hollywood studio picture. Anyway, that's my review, now I'm going to get on to the thing I actually want to discuss.
Let's talk about the metaphysical mythology of Fat Albert.
Fat Albert posits a world where a cartoon man can see a three dimensional girl through a portal, exclaim, "That little girl needs my help!", and just sort of climb through. There are complicating factors: these characters are also travelling through time, and from an artistic world to the natural world. That Albert recognized Doris as 'a little girl' rather than 'an eldritch being beyond my comprehension' seems to be a bit beyond plausibility. But I don't want to get bogged down too hard, because the movie is already making a lot of bizarre claims about the nature of reality and there are many more to come.
For one, even before the portal we learn that the characters in the Fat Albert cartoon are self-aware of themselves as characters in a production. They talk about how they are being written, they have downtime between performances, and they are even aware when their television program is about to start.* Yet they are not simply cartoon actors portraying cartoon characters... the script indicates that they really are Fat Albert and friends. So it's more like these are people who are playing versions of themselves.
*In the era of streaming, it's charming to see a movie posit that the time at which a television program runs can be some sort of universal truth.
They are aware that they are written because they refuse to take a drink of the soda until someone 'writes them to be thirsty.' They are aware that they are drawn because they do not think that they have bodies beneath their clothing ('they never needed to draw them'). This was a turning point for me. Up to a point I was amused by the sloppy worldbuilding. I shifted into distress when Fat Albert insisted that he couldn't remove his clothing in the changing room because there might not be anything underneath, and when Dumb Donald shared that he could not take off his hat because he might not have a face. He does turn out to have a face after all, quite a nice one, which would suggest that these folks transformed upon entering our reality. And yet, they cannot be fully human, because they are fading from our reality. This is indicated both by a cheesy ghost-hand moment, and by the bright colors of their costumes fading over the course of the film (a neat conceit that actually works to the film's detriment; much of the visual appeal of these figures comes from their vibrancy). There is also a profoundly distressing sequence where one of the gang slides down a stone railing, leaving his pants behind in the form of a streak of green paint. This is the point at which Fat Albert and co. discover that they have asses, and also what asses look like.
I'd like to go back to Dumb Donald and his face, because I believe this is a crucial moment in understanding what is going on here. At a point during which nothing much in particular is happening, Dumb Donald exclaims that he is going to the library. His friends react with surprise because he cannot read, but he responds that he thinks he might be able to read now. The next time we see him, he is poring over African American history. From this we can surmise that by entering our reality, these characters are becoming more dimensional, not only in their appearance, but in the transcendence of the stereotypes of blackness that they represent.
Whether or not this juxtaposition was intentional, it is telling that Dumb Donald learns his people's history in the same scene that his hat is removed and he discovers he has a face. Is the film making a claim about the incompatibility of 70's racial stereotypes with early 2000's sensibilities? It's as if the universe itself rejects the possibility that an adult black man may be illiterate.
Dumb Donald is not the only character affected by this cosmic phenomenon. The character Mushmouth, brilliantly and upsettingly performed by Jermaine Williams, has an awakening of his own. Throughout the entire film he has spoken with some combination of stutter, dialect, and disability. This changes when he speaks to a little white girl, who informs him that he talks funny, and laboriously teaches him how to say the word 'balloon.' With this signifier unlocked, Mushmouth suddenly has complete and eloquent control over the English language, and informs his friends that henceforth they should refer to him as 'Mouth.'
It's no accident that a little white girl teaches him this. The film exists in an extremely whitewashed, almost suburban version of North Philadelphia. Not only that, but other than the main cast, all of the crew's antics are done for the benefit of white people. The first, but far from the last, example of this is when Doris stops a little white boy on the street to ask if there is anybody behind her, and he responds, "Yeah. A bunch of freaks and weirdos." The white gaze suffuses this film, and only rarely is this a source of tension. So it seems that in this gentrified North Philadelphia, these archaic stereotypes of blackness are being gentrified as well, right down to this little girl teaching Mushmouth how to talk properly (read: talk white).
The quilting point of the film, the moment the commentary comes into some modicum of focus, is a scene in which Albert seeks out his creator: Bill Cosby himself. When Cosby sees his creation come to life, he collapses forward into Albert's arms as if he had been drugged. But then they slip into a more casual conversation.
After learning that Albert crawled out of the television, Cosby urges him to crawl right back in. The reason he gives is this: Don't try to be something you're not.
The implications of this are stunning, and indicative of the dark side of Cosby's career. He seems to be urging Albert and the crew to know their place. They are two-dimensional stereotypes, and now that they are trying to be something more, they are literally fading from reality. They have no place in this version of North Philadelphia (hearkening back to Doris's very white teacher chastising Albert for suggesting that he is from North Philly). This moral leaves an awful taste in the mouth, especially considering that Cosby is telling characters who have learned to read and speak to forsake that to return to their purgatorial daytime TV rerun slot. And no, when they return to the cartoon world, they do not retain these changes. In a scene that is played for comedy but reads more as a Flowers for Algernon sort of existential horror, Mushmouth loses his command of language, and Dumb Donald is forced to put his hat back on because his head has disappeared, leaving only floating eyes and mouth.
The Cosby Show, which broke barriers at the time, has left behind a legacy of compromise. The show meant a lot to a lot of people, but ultimately portrays a family striving for whiteness. The comfortable sweater-wearing middle class suburban version of blackness was built to be unthreatening to the white gaze. It's no surprise that Cosby famously loathed the counterculture of The Simpsons.** It's no surprise that Cosby appears to be the only black creative involved at a high level of this particular production (the film was directed by a white man and co-written by a white man). It's no surprise that Cosby's conservative empire of 'family values' would come crashing down around him exposing a web of deception and perversion.
**It is a famous anecdote in my family that when The Simpsons started airing, my grandpap proclaimed it to be trash that would never last as long as The Cosby Show.
So it is that Fat Albert, which positions itself as a goofy update to a classic property, is actually a descent into existential confusion that says nightmarish things about the place of blackness in our world. Hey hey hey, let's reinforce the racial contract today.
1 / 5 BLOBS
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