In chapter five of Animal Farm, George Orwell’s indestructible (or so we imagined) allegory from 1945 for the betrayals of the Soviet Union, Napoleon, the porcine stand-in for Joseph Stalin, takes an unconvinced look at his rival’s plan for a windmill.
The author has him stand “for a little while contemplating them out of the corner of his eye” before making judgment. “Suddenly he lifted his leg, urinated over the plans, and walked out without uttering a word,” the paragraph concludes.
Now that’s what I call criticism. Shall we just leave our review of this disastrous project at that?
इससे जुड़ी जानकारी
It’s an interesting irony that Animal Farm arrives in the same week that right-wing culture warriors seek (feebly) to portray Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey as an exercise in “woke” revisionism. That sounds like a silly argument.
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The notion that filmmakers might redraw Animal Farm as, complete with rapping pigs, a crude attack on capitalism in general and on Donald Trump in particular sounds even less likely. But that is not a million miles from what we have got.
Orwell, an obsessive eulogist of English culture – “a cut off the joint, two vegetables and boiled jam roll”, he slavered in The Moon Under Water – would suffer apoplexy at the translation to the United States alone. Unbroken American accents include those of Kieran Culkin, Kathleen Turner and, as a chortling Napoleon, Seth Rogen.
Andy Serkis’s animation has the animals of Manor Farm revolt against Farmer Jones in the opening five minutes and set up something like a collective. Before long, any interest in the dynamics of the post-revolutionary Soviet state is abandoned for Napoleon’s self-aggrandising populism (can you see who he is yet?) and the even more sinister antics of a soul-crunching conglomerate run by Glenn Close’s evil Freida Pilkington.
You will search in vain for Orwell’s sentimental affection for Marxist ideals as outlined in the book by the now-excised boar, Old Major. The younger pigs here devise their own political mythology, which hardly makes sense.
All this would be forgivable if the animation and script were up to scratch. Alas, the film is a corrupt mess of blaring music, mawkish soppiness and (you’re ahead of me) supposedly comic flatulence.
Not all films are equal, but few are less equal than this.
Previews from Saturday, July 18th. Opens nationwide on Friday, July 24th
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