Well, and perhaps it’s worth sharing Your Humble Blogger’s experience with the Annie announcement. A couple of weeks ago, Columbia Pictures released a trailer, and I saw it on the Guarniad website. The article, like a lot of the discussion, highlighted the casting of Quvenzhané Wallis, which seemed odd to me, because (1) not having seen the movie I have no connection with the kid, except she seems to be cute—but then I would scarcely expect them to cast a kid who wasn’t superlatively cute, and (b) nobody really cares who is playing the title role in that show.
Seriously, if I hear about a production of Annie, my first question is who is Hannigan, and then who is Rooster and then maybe who is Warbucks and is there anybody else in it, meaning Grace and Lily and FDR. Or Bert Healy! An awesome cameo opportunity there. I would be interested in knowing who is playing Bert Healy, long before it would occur to me to ask the name of the kid. I would just assume that I hadn’t heard of the kid, because kid. Eleven years old, right? Maybe ten. The odds that I have ever heard of the kid are slight, and are totally unconnected to the odds of the kid being terrific—not that a Hannigan I have never heard of could never be terrific, but I would go to see Faith Prince or Queen Latifah or Tracey Ullman to see what they would do with Hannigan. I wouldn’t go see some eleven-year-old kid to see what they would do with Annie. It’s not that kind of role.
And in this movie, they have cast Cameron Diaz as Hannigan. A terrible, terrible choice. I hates it. I don’t like Ms. Diaz very much at all, but I certainly don’t like her as Miss Hannigan. Nor did the trailer ease my mind about that in the slightest—we don’t hear her sing or see her dance, and her desperate shrewishness isn’t funny in the slightest. Jamie Foxx as the Daddy Warbucks character is fine but not exciting; I expect he will be better than Albert Finney but not as good as Keene Curtis. You know? Fine. And I didn’t see anybody else I know—someone named Rose Byrne is Grace and turns out to be someone I have seen in things but don’t recognize or remember. IMDB claims that Bobby Cannavale is in it (as the Rooster character? Maybe?) but I didn’t spot him in the trailer. So pretty much an awful cast, as far as I can tell.
And then, there’s the Big Problem. The show is set in the present day. It was always a period piece, of course, made charming by the comic representation of Depression-Era poverty. Hooverville and an orphanage and a stray dog. Jokes about Fiorello LaGuardia and Harold Ickes and the beautiful Boylan Sisters. It works as a period piece. The charming Depression-Era poverty is charming because it’s Depression-Era; at the end of the show we have a New Deal for Christmas and we don’t have orphans any more. That’s what makes the show work. I don’t mean to say that isn’t in some sense problematic, what with rich people paying a hundred bucks a ticket to be told that we solved poverty eighty years ago, but whether or no, it’s what makes the show work. Putting it in the present day makes it charmless, uncharming, anti-charming, really. Daddy Warbucks renting an orphan for a Public Relations Christmas is not clueless but despicable in the current context. And how do you end the thing? How do you solve not only Annie’s problem but the country’s? Does Barack Obama get Mitch McConnell to sing “Tomorrow”? I think not. I mean, not now. In sixty years, sure, that would be funny and charming. Not now. Not in the slightest.
So. What have we got? A terribly misguided movie updating with an awful cast, is what we’ve got. Yech. I couldn’t be less excited. Oh, and there’s no lyricist being featured as updating or replacing the topical songs (“We’d Like to Thank You, Herbert Hoover” and “NYC” and “A New Deal for Christmas” at least), so there’s nothing to be excited about there, either. Although IMDB lists Emma Thompson as a third Screenplay author, so that’s potentially a Good Thing (her Nanny McPhee screenplays were quite good), which makes it all of one potential good thing to set against the rest. Not enough.
But really, I didn’t mean to write this much about why the Annie movie looks so terrible to me. The reason I did write all of that is that I am feeling defensive about it, because as I was making my initial response known, other people were making their initial responses known, and quite a few people responded Yech based on… Annie being black. Now, one thing about the internet is that a double-handful of jerks and trolls can look like a trend while actually being, you know, a double-handful of jerks and trolls. Still, I felt awkward because my initial Yech probably sounded a lot like the initial Yech of the jerks and trolls. And why wouldn’t it? How would anyone know the difference? And it led me to ask myself, was there a difference?
Fundamentally, yes. I don’t object to the casting of the title role, I just don’t really care about the casting of the title role. Is it possible that—unconsciously, since I am aware only of not really caring—I was put off by the casting of a black Annie? Or, more probably and troubling, that my preference for Annie as a period piece necessitates a white Annie, and therefore is as one with the white default that is in the end so harmful to non-white folk? Because, really, things are much more complicated than refraining from going A Black Annie? Yech! out in public where anyone can hear you.
And even if it isn’t me, personally—I am still on the side of the bad guys, and that makes me uneasy as well. Can I be right if they are so obviously wrong and we have the same answer? I mean, yes, obviously, I can be right if I am right and it doesn’t actually matter what other people think, but also, maybe not so much that? At any rate I feel it incumbent upon me to defend my response as not being like the racist responses. So I have.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Interesting. I have had *exactly the opposite* reaction – I only very vaguely remember the older movie (they sing “Tomorrow”, right? Oh, and I think there’s something with Annie dangling off a drawbridge at the end, and Daddy Warbucks’ Indian manservant (?) saves her, unless the Indian manservant is something from “A Little Princess” and not “Annie” at all – anyways I certainly couldn’t have named any characters beyond Annie and Daddy Warbucks) and surely would not have cared at all that they were doing a remake, except that I thought Quevenzhane Wallis was captivating in _Beasts_. And the trailer seems like lots of fun, and like it might be a non-animated movie to which I could take my kids (they really haven’t seen much live-action anything beyond Sesame Street clips), so, clearly, this whole thing is being marketed, successfully, to people like me.
I think perhaps there was an Indian Manservant in the movie version you are talking about; I could rant about all the things that were terribly, appallingly wrongheaded about that one but I prefer not to think about it—and certainly prefer not to watch it again after all these years. Ugh. I am comparing it to the musical (I saw the Western national touring company) and the Original Cast Album and so forth. The Disney TV film of a few years back is more like it, perfectly reasonable in fact, if not particularly exhilarating.
It’s a fair point, though, that the trailer is not aimed at fans of the show, nor would it be sensible, really, to direct the advertising campaign toward fans of the show, or to make a movie that would please fans of the show. Or, really, to make a movie that has anything to do with the show at all…
Thanks,
-V.
Belatedly: My reaction is essentially the same as Amy’s. I’ve seen one (forgettable) stage production of the show, but essentially when I think of _Annie_ I’m thinking of the 1982 movie (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083564/combined) with Albert Finney and Carol Burnett and Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters, which was also pretty forgettable for me. I like the songs, regardless of movie vs show, but the performances aren’t a terribly big deal for me.
Whereas Quvenzhané Wallis was by far the best part of _Beasts of the Southern Wild_ imo, and I thought she and Jamie Foxx were charming in the trailer and had good chemistry. I like Cameron Diaz, and it looked to me like they’re going for a less over-the-top-caricatured Hannigan than in the 1982 movie, which imo is all to the good. And I liked the kids singing and dancing, and the trailer overall really worked for me. I’m looking forward to the movie much more than I ever would’ve expected. (Like Amy, I would’ve shrugged if someone had just told me there was a new Annie movie in the works.)
I see what you’re saying about updating the setting, but I’m crossing my fingers in hope that they’ll do a good job with it. To me, the underlying essence of the story is that an optimistic orphan kid softens the heart of a rich person, despite the machinations of the underhanded person who runs the orphanage; I think there’s plenty of room for reinterpretation of that story in all sorts of contexts. It started out as being firmly of its time, but, y’know, so did Cinderella; so did Superman; so do lots of the stories that we reinterpret and reinvent to meet the needs and conventions of new times. (For that matter, taking a comic strip from the 1920s and movies from the 1930s and reworking them as a Broadway musical in 1977 probably involved a certain amount of reframing. The old-time charming poverty you mention wasn’t old-time or charming when the comic strip was first published.)
Right–the thing about the show is that it works (in my arrogant one) because it is set so safely in the past. Whether the strip worked on the same lines is a different question, and would involve my actually reading the strip from that time, which not so much, me. Although the Wikipedia page is interesting and suggests that in the height of the Depression, Annie’s adventures “touched upon the supernatural, the cosmic, and the fantastic”.
But the real point of what you and Amy are saying, I think, is that the trailer (and the whole thing) is supposed to appeal to you, who are fond of Quevenzhane Wallis and have little fondness for the show, possibly influenced by the terrible 1982 movie version. That combination of categories is much larger and more profitable than the combination I reside in, having no particular fondness for young Ms. Wallis and tremendous fondness for the show. Which doesn’t make me wrong about how terrible this thing will be, but makes the film-makers not obligated to care about whether I am right or wrong.
As for the reinterpretation of the Annie story—I would have much less problem with a new Li’l Orphan Annie movie set in the present day than with a reinterpretation of Annie, with “Tomorrow” and “Hard Knock Life” and all—the character and situation are up for grabs like Cinderella and Superman, but the show is (in my opinion) not.
Thanks,
-V.