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.

Micmacs (2009, R)

I love Jean-Pierre Jeunet movies.  They’re fun and weird, bursting with color and character, and they often have the feel of having been made expressly for me.  Micmacs was the first Jeunet film I saw on the big screen, and it was an utter delight.

The arms industry hasn’t been kind to Bazil.  When he was a child, his father was killed overseas by a landmine, and as an adult, he’s hit by a stray bullet in a freak accident.  Left with no job, no home, and the bullet lodged inoperably close to his brain, he’s taken in by a band of junkyard-dwelling eccentrics.  At first, Bazil is content in their off-the-beaten-path life, but a chance encounters leads to his discovery of two companies:  the one that made his father’s landmine, and the one that made his bullet.    He enlists his new friends to help him take creative revenge on these two very destructive forces in his life.

I’m in love with the characters, a real Island of Misfit Toys bunch who’ve found each other.  My personal favorites are the former ethnographer, who speaks almost compulsively in aphorisms and figures of speech, and the scrapheap artist, who invents whimsical mechanic curiosities out of discarded fragments.  There’s also the sensitive contortionist, the daredevil world-record chaser, the human calculator, the ex-con who survived the guillotine, and the affectionate mother to all of them, regardless of their assorted ages.  And Bazil is just terrific.  Like a lot of Jeunet protagonists, he’s not defined by what he does (he used to work in a video store,) but how he is; he’s an incurable clown with heaps of ingenuity and a charming collection of fun routines.  He feels a bit like a silent comedy character dropped into the real world (well, realish – this is still Jeunet,) and it’s neat to see this peculiar jester taking on the big evil corporations.

Speaking of which, anyone who’s seen Amélie will know Jeunet’s talent for fanciful revenge, which comes together superbly here.  In their quest to get back at the slimy arms dealers, Bazil and his comrades display shrewd observance, clever problem-solving, and offbeat creativity.  Everyone gets in on the action, putting their unique skillsets to use (from human-cannonball maneuvers to hiding in suitcases.)  As with Amélie, the retribution is brilliant largely because of how small it is.  Instead of one big plot, they set a plethora of tiny wheels in motion.  Some of them are only seemingly-small acts, insignificant to anyone else but infuriating to the arms dealer in question.  Others are nothing on their own, but they accumulate and build to a swarm.  Still others are little catalysts that spark bigger events.  Most of all, they serve the purpose of getting their opponent to do much of the work for them, dissolving into paranoia and aggravation and ultimately causing larger problems for himself than the gang does.  Their crowning achievement at the end of the film is just stupendous – no words for how ingeniously they pull this off.

The design and detail is Jeunet at his best.  The junkyard hideout looks amazing, and all of Tiny Pete’s cobbled-together inventions are enchanting.  I love the little detours of non-plot-related oddball charm, the dialogue sparkles with humor, and the story is winningly crafted.  Just a stellar film all around.

Warnings

Swearing, a little smoking/drinking, brief sexual content, a little violence, and thematic elements.