The upside is low. Barry Jenkins is a deeply distinguished filmmaker and has made the year’s most commercial and artless film. It’s a shame. Just the expenditure of time spent making this and not an unparalleled modern classic is enough. Not that Barry Jenkins owes us anything. He also wrote the good biographical boxing film The Fire Inside this year and you can go see that if you can find it. Easier to find Mufasa and you’ll see it too, won’t you, do you not have children or otherwise some attachment to the material? Are you not going to watch our best director make a Disney movie?
You are. You can. And it’ll be okay. Just as it’s okay Barry Jenkins made the thing. There’s certainly no moral imperative that the good filmmaker must make good films outside the market. Let Barry Jenkins get the bag. You let more hackneyed directors do it without too much blame. We even let Guy Ritchie, Tim Burton, and Robert Zemeckis continue to make movies after the horror they wrought.
Barry Jenkins has probably made one of the better ones of these. That’s not counting David Lowrey’s Pete’s Dragon (2016), where Disney allowed artfulness as an accounting error. Here, the world of Jon Favreau’s The Lion King (2019) is given a standard origin prologue story. It’s a little prettier, equally unsettling with its dead eyed animals, and the camera moves more — there are often thoughtful gestures afforded to the camera, insomuch as there is one and it can float and rotate and spin around things and move through environments and frame ugly computer animals in beautifully humanizing Barry Jenkins-like ways.
The past is captured as prologue. It exists as a near adaptation of The Lion King 1½ (2004)… sort of, in that we’re retracing some of the same origin stories from before the original 1994 movie. This time it’s about the relationship between Mufasa and Scar, which was so interesting in what went unstated and is not very interesting when it’s all over-explained.
The dramatic crux of the film makes a small mess out of the Shakespeare by way of the Savannah Hamlet of the original story. The wires are crossed now. Everything must be explained and excused. We have to get the crew together. Justify everything with origin stories. Almost nothing requires this treatment and The Lion King is already such a self-complete story, that riffing on the iconography of it makes for a shallower attempt at execution — when commenting on the Broadway version or the original movie, inside this movie, you’re reminded you’d rather be watching either of them.
As the characters develop beyond the incestuous revenge and redemption story of Hamlet, the objective of the film becomes something made out of a market reality and not because there is any more to say. We do not really reach any new conclusions. There is some retconning that’s disruptive of past efforts and if anything, the story goes sideways the more elements it tries to justify, by replacing story with plot and characters with fan service archetypes.
We know Barry Jenkins can do more with real actors because he is an exceptional framer of humanity. He directs like a poet attached to the dance of the human soul and frames characters with such love, passion, and resilience, that it’s incredibly silly when he’s directing computer animals instead. That it’s Jenkins and he’s great and the movie is bad is possibly a worse outcome than Favreau but he’s mediocre and the movie is bad. There’s a little sauce in a few of the new Lin-Manuel Miranda songs and Dave Metzger approximates Hans Zimmer just fine but like any of the good aspects here, they are approximations of something you like more.
The moral center of The Lion King is already so exact. It doesn’t help when Mufasa expands directly upon it, reducing both movies, in its process. There’s just little here besides what computer graphics can do nowadays which seems much less interesting than what animation could do 30 years ago. And the whole movie goes like that. May Barry Jenkins flourish and go on to a long career of not making more Disney live action remake movies.