'Remarkably Bright Creatures' Review: Sally Field in Netflix Drama
'Remarkably Bright Creatures'
Courtesy of Netflix
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According to nearly everyone in Remarkably Bright Creatures, octopuses are extraordinary beings. They’re shockingly clever, capable of manipulating tools, and nimble, able to slip in and out of the tiniest cracks. They can be patient and observant and possibly even funny, squirting at the occasional human just to get a rise out of them.
So it seems a bit of a bummer, frankly, that Marcellus (Alfred Molina), the cephalopod narrating Netflix‘s adaptation of Shelby Van Pelt’s much-loved novel, is not given much more to do than fuss over the inner lives of two humans.
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Remarkably Bright Creatures
The Bottom Line
A poor octopus movie but a charming human one.
Release date: Friday, May 8 (Netflix)
Cast: Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, Beth Grant, Sofia Black-D’Elia, Colm Meaney, Alfred Molina
Director: Olivia Newman
Screenwriters: Olivia Newman and John Whittington, based on the novel by Shelby Van Pelt
Rated PG-13,
1 hour 51 minutes
But I suppose it’s hard to blame him when the people in question are played by Sally Field and Lewis Pullman, two reliably endearing performers who are somehow even more winsome together. As a film about animals, Remarkably Bright Creatures is human-centric treacle. But as a film about people, its gentle sense of humor and depth of feeling are enough to sweep you away on a wave of emotion.
In the first of many overly blunt observations, Marcellus reflects on what he has in common with Tova (Field), the night janitor at a small New England aquarium and one of the few humans he deems tolerable. They both like the quiet of the night. They both hate wolf eels. Also, “We both dream of the bottom of the sea, and what we lost there.”
For Marcellus, that means his sense of home and freedom; he counts every day of his “captivity” like he’s a housecat in a meme. But the Olivia Newman-directed movie, and for some reason Marcellus, is far more interested in Tova’s pain. By the time we meet her, she’s been living alone in her (stunningly beautiful, it must be said) seaside cabin for years, both her husband and her son having died some time ago. Marcellus can sense her unhappiness, and after she rescues him one night from a tangle of computer cords, decides to repay the favor by fixing it.
The solution literally drives into town. Cameron (Pullman) is another lost soul, a broke musician living out of a very old, very dirty camper. Upon meeting Cameron, Marcellus intuits that he carries the same kind of hurt Tova does. From then on, the octopus devotes his last days to trying to push the two together.
From a distance, or perhaps from the limited view of Marcellus’ handprint-smudged tank, the plot of Remarkably Bright Creatures is almost too tidy to be believed. An ankle injury pulls Tova out of work just as Cameron, who’s stuck in Soul Bay for the foreseeable future thanks to car troubles, happens to be looking for temp work. During job training, it emerges that Cameron is a child in search of an absent parent, while Tova is a parent missing a lost child.
The surrogate mother-son dynamic that develops between them — she scolds him to take his job seriously; he fixes stuff for her around the house — is as inevitable as the ebb and flow of the tides. And for good measure, any time the two threaten to drift apart, Marcellus is there to nudge them back together, often at great risk to himself. The CG used to create Marcellus (led by Chris Ritvo of Untold Studios) is impressively lifelike, giving him real heft and personality, and Molina’s performance of his inner musings on the failings and quirks of our species perfectly wry and amusing. But there’s no escaping the My Octopus Teacher-esque sense of anthropocentrism. For all Marcellus insists on his own superiority, he might as well be a cutesy dog in a rom-com.
And yet. For all of Remarkably Bright Creatures’ limitations and contrivances, the actual bond that forms between its two human souls feels sincere and organic. It comes down to the lead performers and the crackling chemistry between them, which Newman and John Whittington’s script helps build step by step over such offbeat adventures as an open-mic night in which Cameron shows off his musical chops, or a road trip that ends in a hilarious gun-waving confrontation.
Field is unsurprisingly fantastic as Tova,