At Tribeca: Idiots and Angels

Idiots and Angels
Dir. Bill Plympton
Reviewed by Cullen Gallagher

Bill Plympton’s gently sardonic wit and inimitable visual style has made him one of the most renowned and acclaimed animators is recent years. His latest feature, Idiots and Angels, is both the perfect introduction to Plympton’s work (for those still unfamiliar with it) as well as a delightful reunion for his already immense fan base. An expressionistic fable combining elements of noir and surrealism (in characteristic Plympton fashion), Idiots and Angels features, as its protagonist, a disgruntled businessman with a fondness for the drink. When a butterfly appears on his head, the rest of the bar is delighted by visions of grandeur and beauty, while his only impulse is to crush it with his bare hands. But the next morning, he discovers two mysterious stumps protruding from his back that soon grow into majestic wings. Taking advantage of his new capabilities, he tests them out by snatching an old lady’s purse and taking flight—to his dismay, the wings have a mind of their own, and they promptly beat him over the head, take back the purse and return it to the old lady.

Plympton’s bodily nightmare takes an extended turn towards the macabre when a bartender and local doctor learn of the businessman’s wings and plot to extricate them—regardless of the blood that will be spilled—and use them for their own villainous purposes. Idiots and Angels differs from most cinematic transformation narratives (such as The Fly) in that there is no biological or technological reasoning for the metamorphosis, which places it more in the literary tradition of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, or perhaps more appropriate would be Philip Roth’s Kafkaesque homage, The Breast. The transformations in Roth and Plympton’s narratives are, at first, seemingly punishments for the protagonists—cosmic justice for their moral deficiencies—but ultimately prove to lead the characters if not to salvation, then at least to a moment of self-awareness that allows for the possibility of change.

The marginal milieu of Idiots and Angels is matched perfectly by Plympton’s animation, which reminds of the sketches that a pissed off high-schooler might scrawl in the margins of the homework he is avoiding. Crass characters, dingy bars, lonely barflies—these are Plympton’s protagonists, and while none of them escape caricature, they are never denied sympathy. (Considering all this, it is of no surprise that Tom Waits appears on the soundtrack, as they both share a love for the downtrodden, though Plympton is decidedly less sentimental than Waits). The lovingly sullen atmosphere of the film never falls into misanthropy, partially because Plympton (and his audiences) find too much joy in laughing at the characters’ ornery behavior and the bizarre way the situations resolve themselves. The detour may be long and nightmarish, but at the end of Plympton’s journey there is redemption and hope, however—as Penelope Huston said of the endings of Preston Sturges’ films—always with a Cheshire cat’s grin.
        
Sat, May 3 at 8:00PM.