Flubber (1997)

Flubber arrives in 1997, a remake of a 1961 Disney comedy, and carries the cultural baggage of neither era in any meaningful sense. Robin Williams plays an absent-minded professor who invents a sentient green rubber that makes objects fly, misses his own wedding three times, and saves a small college from insolvency. The film's concerns are kinetic: bouncing, slapping, and the reliable comedy of a substance that refuses to sit still. On the matter of social consciousness, it is a vacuum. Not a hostile vacuum. Simply the ambient indifference of a family comedy built before such questions were routinely asked of family comedies.

Two faint flickers deserve mention. Marcia Gay Harden's Sara Jean serves as college president, a small note of institutional female authority that the screenplay never examines. The villains are a wealthy sponsor and an idea-stealing corporate rival, which gestures toward a rich-villain tradition, though the film resolves its financial crisis by cutting a deal with the Ford Motor Company, a conclusion that would embarrass any serious reading of class politics. Weebo, the robot assistant who loves the professor and sacrifices herself for his happiness, is the film's most emotionally intricate creation, and even that thread is played for pathos, not politics.

All that remains is pure slapstick. No sermons, no moral instruction, no attempt to educate the audience on the correct arrangement of the world. The film was panned on release and the criticism was accurate: the effects overwhelm the star, the script thins out, and the whole enterprise feels like a machine running on fumes. But its failures are failures of craft, not of ideology. In a landscape of relentless instruction, there is something almost restful about a movie that simply wants to show us a flying car and call it a day.