Micmacs (2009)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Micmacs arrives with the musty fragrance of a director who has spent too long arranging whimsy in a vitrine. The premise is a revenge caper: a video shop clerk takes a stray bullet to the skull, joins a commune of scavengers living beneath a mountain of scrap, and plots against the two arms manufacturers who ruined his life. The film is billed as a satire on the arms trade, and it means this. Two wealthy executives, callous and interchangeable, are humiliated, ruined, and finally tricked into confessing their sins on camera before a YouTube audience. The anti-corporate instinct runs through every frame. It is the film's spine, and it is the only part of the film with genuine teeth.

Elsewhere the ledger is thin. The troupe of misfits is diverse by accident of casting, a human cannonball here, a contortionist there, a former accountant, and the whole assembly reads as circus texture instead of statement. Omar Sy appears, does his work, and departs without the screenplay noticing. An African dictator enters as a stock villain, a plot device in fatigues. The women of the household are capable and charming and remain decorative. Bodies are deployed for slapstick, folded and fired and stuffed into refrigerators, but the film has no interest in saying anything about them. Nothing here concerns sexual identity, the climate, or the workings of the mind. The desert finale, a staged confession complete with a live grenade and an unarmed land mine, gestures at moral seriousness while keeping its tongue planted firmly in cheek. The sermon is short. The clowns do the preaching.

The film leaves us with a confection that holds a grudge. It is pleasant, inventive, and mildly exhausting, like a dinner guest who has prepared a lecture and a magic trick and insists on performing both. The trick is better than the lecture.