In the face of Dolittle’s unanimous, Serenity-level panning (an unfortunate turn of events for the studio responsible for its release–Universal–that perhaps overly delights in the humanized animal concept), one must note that the only person who could possibly know how Robert Downey Jr. feels–Rex Harrison–is in the grave. Because, for whatever reason, the Eddie Murphy version of 1998 (more an interpretation than adaptation) was the only film adaptation that could vastly recoup its box office expenses (so much so that a sequel arose). And yes, the budget for this latest Stephen Gaghan rendering was not exactly shoestring (175 million and earning back only 57 of those millions–worldwide–on opening weekend), chock full of special effects and CGI that the 1967 Rex Harrison version did not have the luxury of employing. Which is perhaps why the studio bribed the Academy to give it a nomination for, among other categories, Best Picture. It naturally went on to win for Best Visual Effects (using roughly 1,200 live animals during filming at a time when CGI was not a fallback), as well as Best Original Song.
Speaking of the latter nomination, in the Robert Downey Jr.-starring one, Danny Elfman provides the music (just as he did for the also unwarrantedly maligned live action Dumbo from Tim Burton), and is just one of many talented and star-powered names that one would think might give the movie a bit more of a boost in the eyes of critics and audiences. The co-written script with Gaghan, Dan Gregor, Doug Mand and Chris McKay is based largely on the second book by Hugh Lofting in the Dr. Dolittle series, entitled The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle. That Lofting originally formed the character of Dolittle and the initial stories centered around him while stationed away from England during World War I oddly ties the film back to its origin story in 2020 thanks to it also joining the likes of sharing theater screen time with 1917 at the moment.
With many of the elements of The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle still in place, Downey Jr.’s portrayal also intermixes inspiration from a Welsh physician named William Price (which is why Downey Jr.’s accent might sound like a bastardized English one to most). Known for being a “neo-Druid”—as well as “radical” and “eccentric”—the most common available image of him indeed looks quite a bit like our 2020 John Dolittle at the outset of Gaghan’s movie. Disheveled, unkempt and speaking in tongues with the animals in sounds specific to each of them, we learn from our parrot narrator, Polynesia (Emma Thompson, who actually did better with this than Last Christmas), that Dolittle’s self-sequestering and refusal to engage with or treat human patients has stemmed from the loss of his one true love, Lily (Kasia Smutniak), lost at sea while in search of an arcane remedy available via the Eden Tree, a near mythological entity in a milieu guarded by a dragon, Ginko-Who-Soars (Frances de la Tour)–the one responsible for causing the apparently most scandalous instance of the movie: a fart scene. In which Dolittle pulls out, in addition to various types of armor from lesser men who have tried to enter the cave and failed in the past, a set of bagpipes. It is, to be sure, the moment that has everyone lying in wait to make a pun out of Dolittle’s name thanks to his impromptu skills as an animal proctologist.
No matter, they can’t take the sweetness–the sheer harmless innocence–of the story away from Downey Jr. or anyone else involved in making the movie. Maybe the problem is not the film itself, but that the collective at large has grown so jaded, that they can’t take something so wholesome anymore. The type of kids’ movie where the word “SEX” isn’t even spelled out in the clouds. What’s more, the narrative banks on the fact that people are (and should be) automatically sympathetic toward animals. That they can be charmed by the adorableness of a dog wearing glasses or a gorilla with severe anxiety. But oh how they’ve underestimated what a cruel, desensitized world it’s become.
To the point about the gorilla’s–named Chee-Chee (Rami Malek, another goddamn Oscar winner in the ranks of this cast)–anxiety, the psychology aspect of this version plays up Dolittle’s empathic abilities. His unique gift for understanding animals so well because of just how aware he is that humans are more animalistic than any of them (farts and all). There is seemingly only one other person in the world who can appreciate this talent of Dolittle’s, and it’s an all creature-loving boy named Tommy Stubbins (Harry Collett)–also a character taken from The Voyages of Dr. Dolittle. His disinterest in hunting is at war with what his uncle wants him to do, resulting in him accidentally shooting a squirrel as he deliberately misfires hitting a gaggle of ducks. For it is always a squirrel that leads Tommy to his mentor. In this case, a squirrel named Kevin (Craig Robinson). Along with Tommy and Lady Rose (Carmel Laniado), a devoted child subject to Queen Victoria (Jessie Buckley), they abruptly show up to Dolittle’s door after years of the property (subsidized and protected by the queen) being deserted a.k.a. closed off to the public to ask him for their favors.
Irascible and disturbed by the sudden infiltration of humanity into his animals’ lair, Dolittle is obstinate to a fault, more concerned with rescuing the squirrel than any human sovereign. Yet when Polynesia overhears Lady Rose telling Tommy that the queen is on her deathbed and that the erstwhile “sanctuary” she has allowed Dolittle and his animal friends to inhabit will be as good as lost to him if the queen dies and the deed is turned over to “the nation,” she knows she must convince him to shake himself out of his mourning over Lily. Otherwise she has plenty of ins at the Regent’s Park Zoo (not just for herself, but the others soon to be displaced as well).
Faced with the grim reality of genuinely having no one to talk to other than himself, Dolittle capitulates to paying the queen a visit, where his former medical school “adversary” from Edinburgh, Dr. Blair Müdfly (Michael Sheen, always a wannabe dastardly villain), is tending to the queen, overseen by one of her top advisors, Lord Thomas Badgley (Jim Broadbent). With the animals in tow to help him assess the situation, along with his new stowaway apprentice, Tommy, it doesn’t take long for Dolittle to realize (thanks to an interrogation of the octopus in the tank near her bed–did they have such things in Victorian England?) that she’s consumed deadly nightshade. The only viable cure being a panacea fruit from the impossible to find Eden Tree.
Enter a slew of other adventures involving Antonio Banderas as Rassouli, the ringleader of an island of pirates, guarded heavily by lions and a tiger named Barry (Ralph Fiennes), who has a personal grudge against Dolittle for abandoning him in the middle of their therapy. His sense of inadequacy over never being enough for his mother rears its head (or rather, gold-tipped teeth) as he’s left alone in the cage that is Dolittle’s prison cell to tear him to shreds. It is here, too, that the sense of Dolittle being a necessary shrink to those as emotionally fraught as animals (particularly as they’ve been so abused by humans in all these centuries of interaction, both as domestic “pets” and fighting for their remaining place in the wild) shines through with the type of deftness Gaghan is more known for with other screenplays that earned him more favor (e.g. Traffic and Syriana).
So no, one takes it back. Even Rex Harrison would not be able to fathom Robert Downey Jr.’s pain and disappointment over the “failure” of Dolittle right now. Because Rex Harrison had no empathy for anyone, least of all animals (just ask his fellow Jewish and black co-stars at the time, Anthony Newley and Geoffrey Holder, respectively). Come to think of it, neither do most people. It made sense that 1967’s adaptation should flop. But this redux event, this is nothing more than a tragic statement on just how much children and those saps still taking them to the movie theater have lost their innocence, and their appreciation for the analog wonder of animals talking. If they really could without manipulation of a computer screen, perhaps they would say, like Fiona, “This world is bullshit.”
