Written by Marisa Carpico
Plot: When two gods of the underworld place a bet on which suitor a young girl (Zoe Saldana) will eventually marry, they risk not only the fate of their realms, but the fate of a small town.
While The Book of Life is ostensibly a movie about the Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead), audiences needn’t be familiar with the holiday’s customs to enjoy the film. Truth be told, the movie doesn’t seem to know much about the holiday either. While the film passingly acknowledge the holiday’s tradition of leaving offerings like food and marigolds on the graves of deceased family and friends, it mostly cobbles together elements from different Central American lore to make its own world.
Three deities watch over the proceedings. There’s La Muerte (likely a version of the folk/catholic figure Santa Muerte) a personification of death who, in the film, is a bit of a seductress and rules the Land of the Remembered souls. There’s her longtime lover and rival, Xibalba (which is actually the name of the Mayan concept of the underworld but is personified here as a sort of glowing green and black, winged grim reaper) who rules the Land of the Forgotten. And then there’s the Candlemaker, who doesn’t exist in any lore I’ve ever heard of and seems to be a sort of generalized Christian God-like creator character.
Despite its muddled mythology, The Book of Life’s world is beautifully animated enough that it’s easy to ignore any possibly offensive cultural appropriation. Less easy to ignore is the awful plot. The film is the first from Reel FX Animation Studios and if the company ever hopes to become as successful as Disney or even Dreamworks’ animation divisions, then it’s got to find better material next time around. Because as colorful and imaginative as the film is visually, its story is at once unoriginal and problematic.
The set up is familiar to anyone who has ever consumed American media: childhood friends Joaquin (a surprisingly expressive Channing Tatum), Manolo (Diego Luna) and Maria (Zoë Saldana) are stuck in the classic love triangle dilemma only characters in fiction ever experience. The twist here is that the whole of the afterlife depends on which suitor Maria chooses because the aforementioned La Muerte and Xibalba have placed a wager on the choice. If Joaquin wins, Xibalba takes over the Land of the Remembered. If Manolo wins, La Muerte keeps her place and Xibalba promises to never meddle in the affairs of humans again. But none of those stakes really seem to matter to the movie, the whole point here is the men.
Joaquin is the physically impressive soldier who’s spent so many years cultivating his ego that Maria’s desires barely factor into his thoughts at all. Manolo is the standard sensitive nice guy. He comes from a family of bull fighters but longs to be a musician (his music, by the way, consists of cringeworthy covers with Radiohead’s “Creep” being the film’s biggest travesty). Maria is the girl we see so often in these situations: sassy, independent, physically strong and pretty much without any control over her own fate. Make no mistake, while the story is supposed to be about Maria’s “choice,” it takes almost no time to watch her make it or portray her as an object in two battles between gods and men. Instead, we see her look at turns starry-eyed and annoyed as Manolo and Joaquin throw away years of friendship in increasingly pathetic attempts to woo her—because that’s a good lesson for kids. By the end of it, any semblance of complexity is abandoned when she becomes a standard damsel in distress. It’s all rather disappointing and tiresome and you can almost hear Saldana’s frustration at having to add to her résumé another one of these superficially strong female characters who are still secondary to the male savior characters (Gamora or Neytiri, anyone?).
So, if you’re looking for a solid family movie this Halloween or Day of the Dead, The Book of Life isn’t it. Go see The Boxtrolls instead, at least it has a story you won’t worry about kids taking in and any cringing you do will be intentional.
Rating: 3/10
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