Favorite Characters: Bazil (Micmacs)

Micmacs is a wonderfully fantastic movie, and Bazil has a lot to do with that.  He’s such a fun, kooky oddball, but he’s also a brave, resourceful man with a talent for creative vengeance, and his story has fine moments of heart.  If you put together Sam from Benny & Joon, WALL*E, and a few choice Buster Keaton characters (and taught them all to speak French,) you get someone who looks an awful lot like Bazil. This is a leading man who makes it easy to adore his movie.

If you saw Bazil for the first time, you might make the mistake of assuming he’s a sad sack.  It’s a reasonable enough conjecture – after all, he’s a guy living in a junkyard, after getting dismissed from his dead-end job, after a near-fatal accident left him with a bullet lodged in his head.  He has plenty to be disheartened about, and his default expression tends toward the slightly melancholic (shades of Buster Keaton?)  In truth, however, the term “sad sack” couldn’t come within spitting distance of Bazil.  He’s a lot of things, but in no way is he a man sitting around counting his woes.

While Bazil very clearly has woes, he shows a remarkable ability to make the best of things.  He manages living on the street all right (he finds some pretty clever ways to earn cash,) and he settles quickly into life with the scrapyard misfits.  That said, making the best of things doesn’t mean surrendering, and when Bazil discovers the two arms manufacturers whose products caused him a lot of grief (the land mine that killed his father and the bullet that upended his life,) he decides to go on the offensive.  He’s not malicious of destructive; rather, he acts more like a force for karmic justice, righting the scales by serving up just deserts to a couple of despicable, self-serving characters.

Like Amélie before him, Bazil takes to inventive retribution with whimsical aplomb.  He dedicates himself to rooting out the weaknesses of his opponents, turning their greed, obsessiveness, and delusions of invincibility against them.  He concocts wild, intricate stratagems in which each movement sets off a new chain reaction, a million little acts that destabilize corrupt companies and nudge their avaricious CEOs toward self-destruction.  He’s an exacting but appreciative leader to his friends and accomplices, recognizing the manifold potential for mischief within their diverse skill sets.

Despite the big vendettas, though, Bazil isn’t all work and no play.  Like the others at the junkyard, he enjoys indulging in a bit of levity, and I like how wonderful and weird his little amusements are.  Whether he’s hamming it up with a nonsense language, sending a helium serenade down a chimney, or playing a little dueling monkey-see, monkey-do, he’s tremendously entertaining in a way that you rarely find.  Normally, you’d need a Manic Pixie Dream Girl for that level of charming whimsy, but Bazil isn’t a construct or an object lesson in Living! for the benefit of an actual dynamic character.  He’s a real character in his own right with his own goals and story, and his oddities are simply part of who he is.  And the fact that this goofball is the man who wants to take down two heavy-hitters in the arms industry, men infinitely wealthier, more powerful, and better equipped than himself?  That his quirkiness isn’t something that gets pushed aside when the work begins, but is a consistent trait even through his most proficient moments?  That just makes it even sweeter.  Bazil is an unlikely hero and an unlikely leading man, and his means of coming out on top is just as unlikely.