THE AISLE SEAT - "DR. DOLITTLE"
by Mike McGranaghan
Dr. Dolittle often treads a fine line in targeting its audience. Because it features a lot of cute animals, it will appeal to kids. However, the frequent crude humor makes it a bullseye comedy for adolescents (especially males). And there's a kind of yuppie message about encouraging your children to dream that is ostensibly there for the adult audience. Call it covering every base if you will, but Dr. Dolittle is still an exercise in good-natured raunchiness that delivers the laughs no matter what angle you're coming at it from.
It is a loose remake of the famous movie musical, this time starring Eddie Murphy (who thankfully doesn't sing) as the title character, a physician who rediscovers a gift for communicating with animals after nearly running over a dog named Lucky (voiced by Norm MacDonald). The uninjured dog looks up at Dolittle and says, "why don't you watch where you're going, bonehead?" Dolittle is perplexed, but writes it off as a hallucination. Soon, all sorts of animals are talking to him, some of them asking for medical attention. A trip to the woods with his family proves unbearable for Dolittle; he goes home, but the animals follow. Eventually he gives in and begins treating them for their ailments. Word spreads and more creatures show up at his doorstep.
The special effects in the movie are very similar to the ones used in 1995's Babe. They allow the animals' mouths to move realistically as they speak. To provide voices, the filmmakers have turned to a series of celebrities. More notable guest appearances include Chris Rock as a guinea pig and Albert Brooks as a depressed tiger (a casting idea that's worth the ticket price alone). I enjoyed just trying to figure out who was who. There are also some funny in-jokes; one dog (featured briefly in a shelter scene) imitates a very famous character from a recent Oscar-winning movie.
The animals are the funniest thing in Dr. Dolittle. Of course, animals and people don't really need language to communicate with each other - we do that though emotions and body language. It's fun, though, to imagine what animals would say to us if they could speak our language. Dr. Dolittle imagines them saying things that relate mostly to bathroom habits and sex. At one point, three sheep appear at Dolittle's door and proclaim in unison: "Our butts hurt!" MacDonald gets one hilarious scene at a vet's office where Lucky is subjected to a thermometer in his hind regions. Not all the movie's jokes are scatalogical, but they seem to be the most memorable.
Murphy, an often brilliant comedian, is forced to play straight man to the creatures and the effects. It is an unusual choice for someone of his brazen talent, but at least he has a few scenes where he gets to cut loose. One particular moment - shown in the film's previews - has him giving mouth-to-mouth to a rat. Murphy handles the physical comedy in the scene perfectly, spitting out little rodent hairs before preparing to try again.
I got a lot of laughs from the scenes in which Murphy talks to the animals. What doesn't work is a lame subplot involving Dolittle's practice, where an overly avaricious partner is more concerned about making money than healing the sick. He is played by Oliver Platt, a fine actor who portrayed a similarly driven character in Warren Beatty's Bulworth. It's a tired cliché to position the businessmen against the humanists (or, in this case, the animal lovers); although the movie espouses an admirable point of view, it really is nothing we haven't seen before.
I think the filmmakers might have had a clue that this subplot was lame. It's brought in from time to time, only to be thrown right back out the window in favor of more animal high jinks. Good. Director Betty Thomas (Private Parts) knows what the comic gold of her film is. So does Murphy, who supports his co-stars instead of trying to upstage them. Many films try to use animals as a source of humor, but Dr. Dolittle is one of the few to fully understand how wonderfully funny they can be.
(
out of four)
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