As a very wise man who does a voice in DR. SEUSS' THE LORAX said to me recently, "Who the fuck cares if the message of THE LORAX is 'Take care of your environment.'?" Guess what? The book had the same message, and it wasn't even in 3-D. I think the worst thing I can say about this latest adaptation of the lovely book of Dr. Seuss is that it tries to hard to be all things to all people, especially if those people are children. So many filmmakers producing works for youngsters seem to think that they key to keeping kids' attention is dumbing down the work, and that simply isn't the case. But that's how THE LORAX was constructed, and as a result we get bathroom humor, broadly drawn villains, and a grammy character voiced by Betty White.
The Lorax isn't even the star of the film. That honor goes to a young man named Ted (Zac Efron), who is trying so hard to impress Audrey (Taylor Swift), that he escapes his nature-free community (everything seems to be made of plastic, and you have to buy clean air the same way we pay for water today) to find a real-life tree, which he's heard you can get from a character called the Once-ler (Ed Helms). The man in control of the plasticized town is O'Hare, a little man with the big voice of Rob Riggle, and for reasons that are a mystery, he uses all of his money and power to keep Ted from leaving the town or ever discovering a real tree.
Once outside the city limits, Ted finds the Once-ler who relays the story of the gruff little creature called The Lorax (Danny DeVito) who when nature flourished said he "speaks for the trees," although the only sign there were ever trees are the dead stumps scattered across the coutryside. There are images in this movie that, not surprisingly, are torn right from the book, one of my favorites as a kid. I'll never forget those giant tree-chopping machines with 50 axes spinning in rotation to clear-cut entire forests in an instant. Those are here. And without spoiling what little plot there is to the 3-D animated feature, much of the film involves a series of chases involving the Lorax and O'Hare and Ted and Grammy and Audrey (separately and together in both the present and in flashbacks) trying to protect the very last seedling in existence.
THE LORAX has its heart in the right place and certainly the film is a visual splendor, bringing to life the images from the book and making them pop. But I'm not sure the added elements (primarily to the story) really add anything at all. And a couple of hours after seeing the movie, I'd largely forgotten the details of it. It's strange and a bit sad to think that not a single recent adaptation of a Dr. Seuss work has gotten it right. Those books mean so much to so many people, except apparently the people making these movies. I realize adding elements is necessary because the books are so short, but do the jokes have to be so obvious and pedestrian? Do the bad guys have to be drawn in such broad strokes?
I'll admit, once we get outside the town, I was a little more invested in the way the film was animated and how characters like the Lorax and the Once-ler were realized. But overall, THE LORAX suffocates under the weight of its own attempts to complicate a story that work best when it's simply told. I actually liked the choice of voice actors, especially DeVito as the title character and Helms' almost unrecognizable work as the Once-ler, but they aren't given enough freedom to really inhabit their characters. Still, can any more be that bad if it gets an army of kids to run around saying, "Thats' a woman!?" to each other. Maybe I'm being too harsh...
