DOCTOR DOLITTLE
USA. 1998. Director - Betty Thomas, Screenplay - Larry Levin & Nat Maudlin, Based on the Novels by Hugh Lofting, Producers - John Davis, David T. Friendly & Joseph Singer, Photography - Russell Boyd, Music - Richard Gibbs, Music - Pilar McCurry, Visual Effects Supervisor - Jon Farhat, Visual Effects - Banned from the Ranch Entertainment (Supervisor - Van Ling), Cinesite, The Computer Film Co, C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures (Supervisors - John Mariella & Bob Munro), Pacific Title/Mirage Digital & Pop Film and Pop Animation, Animatronics - Jim Henson's Creature Workshop (Supervisor - David Barrington Holt), Production Design - William A. Elliott. Production Company - Joseph M. Singer Entertainment/Davis Entertainment Co/20th Century Fox. Eddie Murphy (Dr John Dolittle), Kristen Wilson (Lisa Dolittle), Kyla Pratt (Maya Dolittle), Oliver Platt (Dr Mark Weller), Richard Schiff (Dr Gene Reiss), Ossie Davis (Archer Dolittle), Peter Boyle (Calloway), Jeffrey Tambor (Dr Fish) Voices: Norm MacDonald (Lucky), Albert Brooks (Tiger), Chris Rock (Rodney)
Plot: By accident GP John Dolittle suddenly rediscovers his forgotten childhood ability to talk to animals. He is promptly driven around the bend as animals everywhere come to him seeking help. His family think him crazy while his seemingly eccentric behaviour threatens a corporate takeover of his practice.
I grew up with Hugh Lofting's original Dr Dolittle stories written in the 1920s and still remember their delightfully fabulist charms - not unakin to the absurdist joys of a Pippi Longstocking or a 'Wind in the Willows'. So you may understand my bias against this current adaption of the stories. This is a version that might be politely termed a bastardization. About all the film has in common with the stories is the central concept of a doctor who can talk to animals - with everything else having been tossed out. It does have a brief scene in common with the 1967 film version where Dolittle gets thrown in an asylum but other than that the stories have been fed through the modern American children's film formula. Out has gone the period setting and all of Dr Dolittle's fantastical encounters with exotic animals - the talking hamsters and tigers here, technically superb and all as they are, sadly never compensate for the lack of any Push-Me-Pull-You's or Giant Pink Snails. Instead we have a cute, feelgood film which is merely about a character with an outlandish gift. The film wheels out all the cliches associated with this sort of comedy - the doctor's family thinking him crazy, the one-dimensional tightass villains, trite little speeches about being special, the doctor's eventually proving himself and everybody accepting his gift. The 1967 film version may not have been particularly good but it certainly had more of the spirit of the originals than this does.
The film is directed by Betty Thomas, a former actress best known for the part of Lucy Bates, the beat-cop with a frustrated mothering complex on tv's 'Hill Street Blues'. Thomas began to branch out into directing with the likes of the highly acclaimed tv movie 'My Breast' (1994) and received a Best Directing Emmy nomination for the tv movie 'The Late Shift' (1996) about the network wars between the David Letterman and Jay Leno talkshows. Thomas then broke into feature films and had notable success with 1995's 'The Brady Bunch Movie' followed by 1997's 'Private Parts' about the on-air hijinks of Howard Stern.
Unfortunately Thomas is not a very good director. 'The Brady Bunch Movie' consisted only of a single-note joke about sarcastically puncturing the original tv series' naivete, and 'Private Parts' seemed entirely taken up by a scatological admiration for its subject matter Howard Stern's adolescent on-air antics. 'Dr Dolittle' might have been a funnier film if it had a better director - there are several scenes like Dolittle being caught giving mouth-to-mouth to a hamster or acting as an animal therapist that would have been hilarious on paper. But under Thomas's hand the film grovels in an extraordinary excess of toilet humour - a fat lady getting a hamster stuck in the crack of her butt; a rectal probe becoming lost up a dog's ass; CPR being performed on a rat only to find it is a pent-up fart. The talking animals are voiced with the irritating people-saying-silly-things-in-falsetto-voices that shows like 'America's Funniest Home Videos' seem to regard as the height of humour. The film stars funny man Eddie Murphy who over the last couple of years has been trying to rejuvenate a flagging career by reinventing himself in fantasy films but the film fails to give him any opportunity to open up and do the wild and crazy things he does best. In all a sad and lamentable vulgarization of a fine set of children's stories.
Copyright 1998 Richard Scheib
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