Mr. Peabody & Sherman (2014)

Mr. Peabody & Sherman arrives from 2014, a DreamWorks production built on characters that first appeared in a 1960s television segment, and it conducts itself with the tidy, well-mannered confidence of a film that has no argument to make. A beagle with a Nobel prize and a penthouse adopts a human boy, teaches him history by way of a time machine, then spends ninety minutes cleaning up a mess the boy made. The plot involves ancient Egypt, Renaissance Florence, the Trojan War, and a space-time rip that dumps Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton onto the streets of New York. It is busy. It is also entirely content to be a cartoon about a clever dog.

Viewers hunting for contemporary social messaging will come away empty-handed. The historical figures exist to be punched, corrected, or married off. Ms. Grunion, the child protective services agent who threatens to remove Sherman from the home, is drawn as stocky, corrupt, and villainous, which is the opposite of any modern body-positive instinct. The adoption story carries genuine warmth, but it plays as sentiment, not as a thesis about family structures. Sherman's friends include a boy in a wheelchair and a boy of South Asian descent, and the film never once acknowledges them as anything other than friends. That is either a quiet grace or a missed opportunity, depending on the temperament of the viewer.

Even the ending, in which history absorbs modern culture and Agamemnon marries the child services agent, resists interpretation. It is a gag, and it knows it. The film was a box office disappointment, earning a fraction of what its budget demanded, and it left behind a television series and little else. This is a competent, cheerful, mildly overstuffed family picture that lectures nobody about anything except perhaps the value of a good cherry tree anecdote. On the scale of cultural instruction, it registers as silence.

Thematic tags: box_office_number_one. The film reached number one domestically in its second weekend of release. No other classification applies: it is not a sequel, remake, superhero picture, true story, Oscar winner, or adaptation of a published book, its source being a television cartoon segment instead.

{"thematic_tags": ["box_office_number_one"]}