The Muppets (2011)

The Muppets arrives in 2011 as a revival project, a film about the difficulty of reviving things, which is either elegant or merely convenient depending on how much credit we extend to the screenplay by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller. Kermit must reassemble a disbanded troupe, pitch a telethon to indifferent network executives, and raise ten million dollars before an oil tycoon bulldozes the theater. The machinery is pure showbiz. The emotional engine is nostalgia, and the film is honest about how frayed that engine has become. It is warm, tuneful, and entirely comfortable in its own skin.

For those of us keeping careful cultural ledgers, the inventory is thin. The human cast includes Rashida Jones, Donald Glover, Whoopi Goldberg, Ken Jeong, Bill Cobbs and Rico Rodriguez, but the film never pauses to congratulate itself for the assembling. These are performers doing jobs. The villain, Tex Richman, is an oilman who wants to drill beneath the stage, which lends a faint green tint to a story otherwise concerned with real estate and television ratings. Mary can rebuild a carburetor, Miss Piggy edits Vogue Paris, and neither fact is treated as a thesis. The film engages no racial themes, no queerness, and no argument about the body as a political site.

What remains is a movie that wants to make you hum. There is no sermon here, no moment where the puppets turn to the lens and instruct the audience on how to live. It sings about being a man or a muppet and then gets out of the way. A gentler cultural register, rarely encountered now, and one that leaves the classification ledger largely blank.