DESPICABLE ME (3D)

No one hassles me, no one asks what I’m doing in the dark, one thinks of all the films noir in which, to escape their pursuers, the heroes duck into a theater to find themselves agreeably obscured by another reality already unfolding. As the movietickets.com ad I’ve seen sixty times has it, the movie is a train one runs to catch at the station—and may miss. As if the comparison was necessary, as if movies weren’t the ultimate modern conveyance. This is why it is not merely pretentious to say “film,” but simply not as richly accurate as that silly word “movie”—a childish stammering toward the overwhelming essence of this becoming-machine chugging unstoppable across the pitch-dark continent of our astonishment.

When we first meet Gru, the barrel-chested, hook-nosed supervillain, he’s up to inspired banality, comforting a kid who’s lost his ice-cream cone by making him a balloon animal—which Gru proceeds to pop with a pin. He parallel parks like my neighbors—bashing bumpers—and forces his way to the front of a coffee shop line by freeze-raying the other patrons. I stood behind Chris Noth at the Astor Place Starbucks the other day and felt sorry I’d compared him to Shrek.

Devastating ambition, coupled with a sense that time is running out—the younger villains coming up behind. It’s sad when he tries to hype up his C.V. for his minions, and later when the loan officer cuts him off. “Become the man who stole the moon,” says the fatherly (=demonic) inventor, but on the brink of his dreamt triumph Gru falters, he’s fallen for the three orphan girls, he’s become a real dad. What’s the most fraught ambition, the culture’s trickiest sell? Not revolution, nor art, but orthodoxy. It means spreading oneself thin, knowing full well that sick obsession is the far better lever for moving the heavens.

The minions are a masterstroke—cute, amoral bits and blobs of id. The joke is that they’re individualized, he calls them by name. What are they? The proletariat? Pills? Boogers? Gru’s sperm? During the closing credits they test the 3D, crawling so far out along the z-axis that the plane breaks and the film itself “burns” (as in Gremlins 2). All that remains are their shadows in the light of the projector, as if they were among us—we’re them.