Average herd of New Jersey hitchhikers.
The Addams Family (2019) is another entry in the growing collection of films and TV series based on Charles Addams’ family of anti-society people. This version, an origins story, is animated and derives its artistic inspiration from Addams’ original cartoons of the family – an impossibly thin Morticia, the squat, debonair Gomez, and on and on.
So we quickly learn that Lurch is … well … that would be sayin’, as they say. But I do feel free to remark that, based on his entrance into the family, there may be something to be said for giving those who have been put away as mad a place in society. Give them a role, even as crazed as Lurch’s, and the frenzy’s energy may be absorbed by devotion to the role.
But the story has twin centers: Pugsley’s rite of passage, a desperate affair of uncertain judging and physical strenuousness, a veritable microcosm of the family’s search for a place on the landscape, and the evil machinations of a local TV star and interior designer who is bent on, well, being evil.
She’ll fit right in, won’t she? But only if Wednesday permits.
There’s room to hate the art – I didn’t care for Uncle Fester, for example, and my Arts Editor felt Kitty needed to be redone – but the story rarely drags and acknowledges the realities of normal society only when it absolutely must.
And who ever thought of a pink mansion for the Addams?
It’s not quite compelling – but it’s fun.
