“The Simpsons”: Aged to Imperfection

If the fictional town of Springfield had an official symbol, it wouldn’t be the nuclear power plant. It wouldn’t be Blinky, the three-eyed fish cum environmental cautionary tale, or the church, or the Kwik-E-Mart. No. It would be a giant, angry mob, not entirely sure as to the source of its ire but wanting desperately to break something or someone. “The Simpsons,” at its core and at its best, was a brilliant, broad-based satire of the simplest common human tendencies—tendencies toward credulousness, passion, anger, and forgiveness. While the show was never afraid to make specific cultural references, and had stand-ins for figures like Ted/John F. Kennedy (Mayor Quimby), Walt Disney (Roger Myers, Sr.), and even Arnold Schwarzenegger (Rainier Wolfcastle, an Austrian actor who often portrayed the action hero McBain), it was, ultimately, more about human nature in general than about any specific time or place.

But around 1997 or 1998, something changed.

Since then, even as “The Simpsons” has continued to dominate ratings and cultural visibility, its detractors have begun to multiply. Those of us who first encountered the show in the early- to mid-’90s, who spent countless middle- and high-school hours throwing lines back and forth at each other, noticed that things had gone downhill and stopped watching. Theories ranged from the loss of good writers to ever more gimmicky plotlines to simple fatigue of the show’s architects.

So we sat back like crotchety old men and women, complaining that the new generation didn’t get it, would never fully understand how brilliant the show was in its prime. In the era of “South Park” and “Family Guy,” “The Simpsons” had become just another piece of entertainment—still funny at times, yes, but much less frequently so and in a different, less clever way. This is the part that always trips up the shows current fans; since it’s not always easy to define what we old-schoolers mean by “in a different way,” they brush off our criticism as forced nostalgia, or, worse, as part of the exasperating hipster impulse to say of any beloved cultural entity, “I prefer their older stuff.”

Clearly, we’re dealing with a lot of baggage here, so it’s impossible to examine “The Simpsons Movie,” released July 27, in a vacuum. I’ll get the simple part out of the way: Yes, “The Simpsons Movie” is funny. Yes, I laughed consistently. But I still wasn’t satisfied by it. I naively held out hope that the movie would remind me of the show’s golden age but, with the exception of a few fleeting moments, it did not.

The tale begins in church, where Grandpa “catches the spirit” and spouts a strange prophecy (which, after a couple of references, the movie quickly forgets). The rest of the plot revolves—as have several episodes—around an ecological catastrophe. After a pristine Springfield lake becomes a toxic stew and Homer dumps a silo labeled “Pig Crap” in it (he, um, falls in love with a pig early in the movie), the EPA, led by its crazy head Russ Cargill (voiced by Albert Brooks), intervenes and encloses the city in a dome, trapping all its residents. A bloodthirsty mob quickly assembles and seeks out Homer. The Simpsons escape the dome at the last moment and head out to start a new life in Alaska (in a country store en route, they blatantly steal a joke from Wrongfully Accused, one of the best intentionally bad movies ever made).

Three subplots round out the action. Homer and Marge find, to their surprise, that Homer’s unrelenting stupidity and selfishness are putting a strain on their marriage; Bart starts noticing Homer’s defects as a father through hanging out with Flanders; and Lisa, who early in the movie is fully in her element as an environmental activist, falls in love with Colin, a hunky, similarly green-minded Irish boy. Lisa’s love interest is completely tacked on and could easily have been left out. The other two subplots are problematic because we’ve already seen episodes where Marge takes hard looks at her relationship with Homer and where Bart is taken in by Flanders, and because both bring with them awkwardly melodramatic moments.

Despite these dragging subplots, there are funny jokes throughout, and things move along quickly enough. But this is definitely not a movie for the hardcore “Simpsons” fan. While the movie’s writers do throw us a few bones—Grandpa running in circles on the floor in a very familiar manner, a Stampy-like elephant assaulting the dome, and Homer finally successfully traversing Springfield Gorge—the entire movie has the feel of something designed more for casual fans and a hypothetical, focus-grouped Audience At Large than for those who followed the show in its heyday.

The usual elements are thrown in—Bart’s mischievous, Homer’s dumb, and Marge and Lisa are perpetually concerned. But beyond that, the movie doesn’t really reach that deeply into the series’ rich history. For one thing, Springfield’s numerous secondary characters, many of whom have provided some of the show’s most brilliant moments, are almost completely neglected. “The Simpsons Movie” is a film with almost no Groundskeeper Willy, Principal Skinner, or Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, Jr.

And there are numerous spots where the film could have been built to better satisfy “Simpsons”-philes. The most glaring example is the writers’ choice to cast Schwarzenegger as the president of the United States. Why would they not use Rainier Wolfcastle? The impression, done by Harry Shearer, is exactly the same, and one can only drool at the one-liner possibilities of a President Wolfcastle given that Wolfcastle’s McBain once snuck into a criminal mastermind’s palatial lair by hiding in an ice sculpture, only to break out, grunt “Ice to see you!” and open fire.

It’s a small detail to harp on, but a telling one. Had the writers chosen to cast Wolfcastle as the president and given him a few choice one-liners, casual fans may not have appreciated it as much. Using Schwarzenegger makes the movie slightly blander but increases its appeal to the Audience At Large. The writers, unfortunately, appear to have made many such compromises as they slowly cobbled this film together. There are many moments that are much more 2007 Hollywood than “Simpsons”: Homer grabbing his crotch and referring to his cojones; a scene in which we see Bart’s penis (no, I’m not making that up); and Homer deftly and heroically saving the day with some miraculous motorcycle riding.

None of this surprises me, really. I understood going in that it would be foolish to hope “The Simpsons Movie” could magically warp the show back to 1995 or that the demands of we who claim pretentiously to “really get” the Simpsons would supersede the demands of a Hollywood blockbuster. And, as much as it pains me to repeat this, the movie is funny. It’s just funny in a different, less clever way. Thank God we still have DVDs of the old episodes.

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