Garfield: The Movie is probably the worst possible Garfield movie. The filmmakers just don’t get it. Ed Gonzales writes: “The original Garfield liked to conserve his energy—he barely spoke, but the monstrosity Bill Murray brings to life doesn’t shut the fuck up.” Yes, indeed. Obviously and logically, the constant barrage of chatter keeps the film from ever developing a moment of silence. Narration and, in this case, constant dialogue always runs the risk of deconstructing the movie for us. Like American Splendor and the recent Touching the Void, the Garfield filmmakers refuse to let us figure anything out for ourselves, by having their hero assign a definitive meaning to the images that we are seeing. They take out the element of interpretation, one of the joys of the filmgoing experience. These movies chew our food for us. The technique flattens everything out. The picture never develops any depth and exists only as a surface.

With Garfield, I didn’t expect to reach that REM stage of film watching, where ideally, you’re absorbed and hypnotized by the experience. Some film critics describe it as being whisked away by a tornado to Oz. Yes, that abstract wonderland quality is the leitmotif that connects my Favorite Movies of All Time (Taxi Driver, Days of Heaven, 2001, Eraserhead, Gummo, et cetera), but I understood that Garfield wasn’t going to be that kind of movie. I did expect, however, for Touching the Void to be that kind of movie. For those unfamiliar with Touching the Void, it’s about a British mountain climber who breaks his leg while on a climb and is left for dead by his mates. The film basically follows his against-the-odds trek back to the camp. The director Kevin McDonald tells this story through interviews with the three climbers involved in the incident, illustrated by staged reenactments. The inclusion of the healthy, wealthy and wise talking heads explaining what happened and how they felt and what they thought successfully sabotages the picture. The re-enactments are infinitely more intriguing, and told this way, they are made to do little else but illustrate the narration of the heads. Had the film been told with a traditional narrative structure, we suspect that it would have little dialogue and would have to work as pure cinema. (Watching it, you may find yourself lamenting the fact that Leni Riefenstahl’s The Blue Light is so difficult to access.) Void of the interviews it may even be forced to be about something, to possess some sort of thematic resonance. It’s difficult to be effectively stirred by the picture when we’re in the perpetual present. The film never develops any real poetry. The decision to make it into an illustrated documentary instead of a traditional narrative film produces a banal whiff of a high, and prohibits any meaningful discussion on the piece.

The self-deconstruction technique may seem more at home with a comedy like Garfield or American Splendor. Eh, but no. Comedy deals with people and with their weaknesses. By design, all comedy is saying that people are frail. And as such it goes through the whole spectrum, humanism at its warmest (“The Simpsons”) to nihilism at its blackest (“Seinfeld”). But understand that comedy relies on perspective as well. It’s rather obvious that the creators of “The Simpsons” like people, and that the creators of “Seinfeld” hate people, but these attitudes are conveyed through the standards of narrative, character and style. The series exist simply as observations. The problem with American Splendor and Garfield is that they are entirely without observation. They are so predigested that we are unable to make any comment on them. A movie that is wall-to-wall Harvey Pekar or Garfield leaves no room for the audience. Especially difficult is the notion that both Harvey Pekar and Garfield seem to be potentially repugnant characters (provided that we were able to form an opinion on them). The flat post-deconstructed approach can’t help but celebrate them on some level, but again the utter lack of entry point into either picture prevents us from obtaining or seeing any real moral perspective. Garfield begins with the cat waking Jon up, ordering him to serve him breakfast, and then switching his master’s hash with his cat food. Garfield will later steal Jon’s lasagna, steal milk from his neighbors, and humiliate and physically abuse Odie. And all the while he is uttering wry one-liners and winking at the audience. Now what do the filmmakers think about this behavior? I honestly do not have the slightest idea. Again, the film is all Garfield. As that admittedly dreadful tagline explains: “It’s all about ME-OW!” The filmmakers haven’t put themselves into the movie, and we can’t go in either. The only perspective in the film is the pre-digested one of Garfield. We can’t see anything that happens in the picture any differently than Garfield can, because the film is nothing but Garfield.

I’m not sure that the problem is really with the cracking of the fourth wall itself. Going through my memory of films where the characters turn and talk directly to the camera I find the original Breathless (where it was just frank and bold), Wayne’s World (where it was just silly and light), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (which was sincere in the right places), and Funny Games (which, without going to far into it, was simply brilliant). And I certainly shouldn’t gloss over Groucho Marx’s and Bugs Bunny’s contributions to the trend. Those films seemed to comfortable with anarchy; those moments were pitched simply as surprising little moments. It wasn’t something that was embedded in the structure, and thus they never flattened themselves out and alienated the audience. They were just being playful. I find American Splendor and Touching the Void to be dreadful messes, but the “perpetual present” quality of the interluding real-life interviews could be argued to produce a cerebrally challenging filmgoing experience. The films have “artistic merit” in other words. (Writing that, I have to admit to thinking that American Splendor is pandering to the detached hipster segment of the population, but that is still enough merit to set it apart.) Garfield’s intentions seem to be more basic. The filmmakers seem to want to turn Garfield into a pint-sized Ferris Bueller. They’re striving for silliness. The results are far from silly, however; it’s all too deliberate and dense. As Gonzales says, Garfield never shuts the fuck up.

Some critics have compared the film favorably with last year’s The Cat in the Hat, another pleasure-bent light show about a sardonic talking feline. Critics really hated The Cat in the Hat. There is a Pauline Kael quote for every occasion, and Kael seemed to review that film when she wrote of Star Wars: “It’s like a box of Cracker Jacks that’s all prizes.” Yes, only more so. The Cat in the Hat moves fast and looks good, but it is so unhealthy and inconsequential that you lament the pop spirituality of The Grinch and the far purer pop spirituality of the original Star Wars. For children, and I suppose the filmgoing public in general, the picture is the equivalent of McDonald’s: cheap, fast and tasty. I don’t particularly like the thought of belonging to a culture that values The Cat in the Hat, but it was successfully loosey-goosey and bears a greater semblance to Breathless than American Splendor. Mike Myers worked, the boner jokes worked, the purple ooze worked, the Paris Hilton cameo worked. The picture successfully panders to the lowest common denominator. In contrast, Garfield is a poor copy of The Cat in the Hat’s “box of prizes” aesthetic. Did The Cat in the Hat really have these lame puns about cat-scans and the catkins diet? Did it really have this much gratuitous slapstick, of The Cat in the Hat running into walls? Or the Rube Goldberg gags, typically a sure sign of a creatively bankrupt comedy with too much money? The forcefulness of Garfield: The Movie sabotages the humor and fun for one, and for two the picture actually approaches the icy bad post-modernism of an American Splendor or Touching the Void.

The film is a bad adaptation as well. No explanation is provided for why Garfield chatters through the whole movie. It’s unusual for anybody to talk to themselves this much, much less (as again, Gonzales pointed out) somebody presumably as fat, lazy and arrogant as Garfield. What, does he need reassurance? The plot is said to have been adapted (twisted just slightly) from a children’s read-along-book, Here Comes Garfield. Odie is dognapped by a mad TV show host. Garfield discovers that he rather likes Odie and wants to save him.

When the movie Cats and Dogs came out, I know some cat lovers who complained about how the film is terribly speciesist and once again the cats are the villains while the dogs are the heroes. Well, I thought that the plot to Cats and Dogs was dreadfully unrealistic. Cats would never organize to take over the world; as far as they are concerned, they already rule the world. I am a cat person, and I loathe dogs. The attraction of cats is in the very fact that they are fat, lazy, arrogant and evil. Unlike canines, felines are individualistic. Dogs will fight for the good of the pack; cats are in it for themselves. They have evolved beyond the moral imperialism of altruism. Dogs represent everything that is repugnant about Christianity. Dogs shit, piss, fuck and drool all out in the open. To see the dog is to be reminded anew of the shame of our biology. The dog, realizing its worthlessness, will pledge allegiance to its human master, a reflection of the nihilistic (in a sense) premise of Christianity that man is born with sin and the only way to salvation is through realizing that you are worthless and embrace your omnipotent God. Now the cat: a cat will never hump your leg, it will never drool, and when it needs to do those regrettable waste excursions it will do so in a litterbox. The cat represents the success of civilization. The cat has a sense of worth, and thus will answer to no one. It does not need to be pet, but it likes being pet. Being pet, being shown affection, is a luxury. The cat is able to accept and enjoy pleasure without guilt. This is why the cat is seen as evil.

The Garfield that I know and idolize is evil in this manner. That Garfield doesn’t make an appearance in the feature film. Garfield seems to have been weakened in an attempt to provide him with depth and heart, and I think to make him easier for kids to relate to. For instance, Garfield’s conflict with Odie is reduced to a simple case of sibling rivalry. This Garfield is not really any more likable, but he is more flawed and more human. He’s been neutered.

Strangely, Garfield has also been reimagined to be a street cat. The Garfield of the strip rarely seemed to leave the house without Jon. This Garfield leaves his home often enough to have street cat friends who know him by name. I knew Nermal from the TV show “Garfield and Friends” and not from the strip, and he was an androgynous beauty queen. In the film, he’s a whiny sidekick that seems to have been modeled after Bill Murray’s Scrooged co-star Bobcat Goldthwait. Nermal is a street cat also, and unlike the series he doesn’t live with Jon. There’s a rat in the movie that Jon orders Garfield to kill. It turns out that Garfield has worked out a deal with the rat: Garfield will provide him with a steady diet of cookies and the rat will let Garfield put him in his mouth and model for Jon. The rat talks jive. I think that it’s supposed to be a Mexican rat. A little later, Garfield indulges in some more ethnic culture when he dances to a Baha Men song with Odie, a scene that reportedly was a big hit with kids in the audience. The Mexican rats and the faux-Reggae music is in the film to apparently give Garfield some street credentials. I mean, he socializes with spic rats and dances to Baha Men. This is one hep cat that we have here.

It’s not the political incorrectness that bothers me, it’s that the film is politically incorrect in the wrong way. Race doesn’t exist in the original Garfield universe. Garfield is too white, too middle-American. If the film was to be done right, they should have given us homosexual stereotypes (through Nermal) and marginalize race altogether. That would have at least gone with the grain of the Garfield universe, and may have possibly produced something genuinely subversive. Walter Chaw says in his vicious pan of the picture: “Only Christian children who aren't allowed to see Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and lonely middle-aged women working towards making the news for being buried under the ten dozen cats they've adopted will go to this movie on purpose.” Quite. But the film is uncomfortable with this core audience; it refuses to cater to it or to satirize it. The Garfield movie that I was hoping for, really, would have that Blue Velvet/American Beauty/Stepford Wives vibe to it. I was hoping that it would bubble with something strange and even cruel, underneath a clean and sanitary surface. It’s overly simplistic to call Garfield plastic. It’s faux-plastic; it doesn’t even have the charm of plastic. If you like Garfield, I can’t imagine you coming out of this film satisfied.

And what are we to make of Jon? The Jon character has been re-imagined to be younger than his comic counterpart, and has been relocated from suburban Indiana to New York (of course!). Jon was a cartoonist in the strip; the very first “Garfield” comic had him and Garfield talking directly to the reader, a precursor to the fourth-wall cracking done so sloppily in the film version. He’s never in on the joke in the film; he doesn’t even seem to know what is going on with his cat. Garfield has him totally snowed. Forget being a foil to Garfield’s cleverness; this guy is a total non-entity. He’s played by Breckin Meyer whose previous career highlights include dubbing Roberto Benigni’s voice in the American release of Pinocchio and being the victim of the now infamous video game slaying in Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. Apparently, he was also in Clueless. The problem is not that Meyer’s background as an actor is less than glamorous, it’s that there doesn’t seem to be any perspective to him. Meyer is unable to register the humiliation of playing Jon in the live-action version of Garfield. Bill Murray on the other hand…

You know, I actually have been looking forward to Garfield: The Movie for quite some time now. The good people at the message boards of I Viddied It on the Screen have given me very modest shit about it. Imagine my embarassment when I read that quote from Chaw about the only people who would go to this movie voluntarily. Or when I realized that MaryAnn Johanson and Salon refused to even view or review the picture. Pretty much everybody who did review it couldn’t fathom that somebody actually made this movie. Well, as you have seen, I thought that the source material could have been made into a very interesting picture. That they would have made the sort of Garfield film that I wanted is one of those fantasies that I suppose I couldn’t help but perpetuate in my imagination. And yes, I think the unfathomability of a live-action Garfield movie was probably the original root of my interest. However, like the live-action version of Scooby-Doo, I knew about the project for a while though and my interest was powered more by the heat of the novelty than the novelty itself.

What really got me deep into it was seeing that Bill Murray was going to be voicing Garfield. Now, I can’t believe that they got Bill Murray, I can’t believe that Bill Murray agreed to do this movie. Lorenzo Music did the voice for Murray’s Ghostbusters character when it was made into a cartoon series, and Music voiced the original Garfield cartoon. As Music died, Murray was then hired to do the film. And so we have Bill Murray doing the big-budget version of the bargain basement version of himself. Unlike Meyer, it seemed that Murray would know how to be humiliated by the film. Understand that Murray had just, unjustifiably, lost the 2003 Best Actor Oscar a few months ago for Lost in Translation. He was sore about it too, saying, "If I knew this was going to happen, I wouldn't have bothered coming." And earlier: "Awards are meaningless to me, and I have nothing but disdain for anyone who actively campaigns to get one. It's a really unattractive sight to see an actor or actress who really wants an Oscar. And you often see it on the show - you see their faces and the desperation is so ugly." Rationally, it would seem that he was being a spoiled brat, but for some reason you just can’t feel that way about him. Watching him at the Oscars, I worried about him. I actually wondered if he had any idea how cool he was. Those worries were soothed a little when I checked out the Lost in Translation DVD and I realized that, much like the director Sofia Coppola he hates hates hates going to award ceremonies and doing publicity. Much like his character Bob in the movie actually. But, like Sofia Coppola, he loves being on the set making movies. There is a normalcy, a playfulness, in the Lost in Translation making-of doc. No, Bill’s OK. Honest.

And of course, Garfield was announced and made, I believe, before Lost in Translation ever saw the light of day and was a sensation. But still, it was strange to me that Garfield: The Movie would be Murray’s follow-up to Lost in Translation. I’m sure he would have preferred it to be a clean bit part in Coffee and Cigarettes and a starring role in The Life Aquatic. All the same, Murray doesn’t sleepwalk through the film, bringing enthusiasm to a script that would make most sane actors cringe. There isn’t anything potentially interesting about Murray’s performance in Garfield: The Movie; the curious thing is just seeing his name in the credits. The idea of a feature-length comic strip movie featuring the rich man’s Lorenzo Music is endlessly provocative.

But instead of a strange piece of shit, or a self-conscious piece of shit, every effort has been made to make sure that Garfield: the Movie is just your garden-variety piece of shit. I’m not sure that the picture is as bad as it has been made out to be. In the hierarchy of bad movies, I would rank it above Van Helsing and the two Scooby-Doo films. I’m probably stubbornly holding on to my affection for the original concept, giving the film more affection than it really deserves, but all the same that is very faint praise and perhaps especially harsh criticism. Garfield is too mediocre to really be all that bad.