The Newest Muppet Movie Is Like Coming Home
Nostalgia is a funny thing, and it can often blind people to quality (or the lack thereof). And when you’re talking about nostalgia, The Muppets loom large for at least one generation, and it would be easy to assume that any praise you hear for the newest movie is based on a long-instilled affection for the characters.
The thing is, if that were true, then everything the Muppets have ever appeared in would be praised highly, and that is so not the case. Muppets From Space was pretty bad (I mean, c’mon, they didn’t even have original songs!), as was the Wizard Of Oz tv special. Yeah, after seeing that one, I was convinced that the spirit of the Muppets had died along with Jim Henson.
But I was wrong.
You know where it turns out the spirit was hiding? Inside the kids who grew up with Sesame Street and The Muppet Show and yeah, even the babies like me who watched Muppets Tonight, the ones who were still soaking up culture when the Muppets were at the height of their cultural currency. One of those kids was Jason Segel. Another was James Bobin. And Nicholas Stoller. And Bret McKenzie. And I’d bet that Amy Adams, Rashida Jones, Emily Blunt, Jim Parsons, Kristen Schaal, Sarah Silverman, and more were Muppet kids, too. And while it might be enough to make a few jokes, have some celebrities interact with the Muppets, and make a few nods to the past, that’s not what this movie did. Instead, they reached deep, and the result is a film that asks the question, Has the world become too cynical for The Muppets?
I’m only 21 years old, and already I’ve been worn down by life. I have plenty of dark days. I have plenty of self-doubt. It’s a struggle to keep looking forward when I feel myself weighed down by regret. It would be easy to let life turn me sour, but I struggle to keep that from happening because there are people who depend on me. My life is given meaning by the people in it, and I have learned that I am only as strong as the people I surround myself with. That idea is the heart of this film, and it’s articulated right from the start with the preposterously catchy phrase “I’ve got everything that I need right in front of me” from the opening song. I think the scene that really does it for me is at the end, when the Muppets fail to raise enough money to save their theatre, and Kermit addresses the (ridiculous number of) Muppets:
Listen, everybody, we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, and you know why? Because we tried. And if we failed? We failed together, and I don’t know if that’s really failing at all. And I don’t care what anybody says, I don’t care if nobody believes in us…because you know what? I believe. I believe in you. And you. And you. You know, what’s important isn’t this building or a name…it’s each other. So I say, fine, we’ll start over and work our way back to the top, let’s walk out there with our heads held high…as a family. Because that’s what we are.
Life’s not always a happy song. It can be pretty shitty and people can be rotten. Just look at everything going on in the world right now. Everything is not great, and nothing is certainly grand. But family, man, that’s what it’s all about. In one of the most emotionally naked scenes in the film, Kermit finds himself walking down a hallway lined with pictures of all the other Muppets, singing a song called Pictures In My Head, and it’s from the grand tradition of Muppet Songs That Make Me Weep. There is something so direct about the lyrics, as if Kermit (played here by Steve Whitmire, who does a fabulous job of capturing not only Henson’s vocal style but also the small details in performance that always made Kermit feel so real) is speaking directly to the audience:
‘If we could do it all again
Just another chance to entertain
Would anybody watch or even care
Or did something break we can’t repair?”What really pulled this movie together, what really made it a Muppet movie, was the heart. The sense of humor here is warm and playful and occasionally surreal and meta, and there’s not a mean bone in its body (even when they mess around with Jack Black). It’s not malicious, and that in itself is a breath of fresh air.
By the end, I finally had a different understanding of nostalgia and its value. I think it’s weird that generations wallow in their childhood , but then I look around at the world we’ve inherited, and I think back to the promise of what things would be like when we were young, and I realize that people reject the present in favor of the past because of disappointment and disillusionment. The Muppets is spilling over with an optimism that is uncommon in our pop culture today, and beyond that, there is a pure joy at the act of entertaining others that reaches some place inside us that most movies or TV shows never even acknowledge, and they do it well (I’m looking at you, Glee). The Muppets is an affirmation that we can indeed occasionally find our way home again, and that some things just shouldn’t change.
