PG | 1h 35min | Animation, Comedy | 2010
Some of us think we’re terrible until someone tells us we’re not. By accepting us for who we are, they kindle in us a goodness we didn’t realize we had all along, so we learn to nourish our goodness, and not wallow in our flaws. That’s the heart of Chris Renaud’s and Pierre Coffin’s animated comedy, “Despicable Me.”
Can you imagine a villain playing the lead? Milton created one in “Paradise Lost” and this film does as well, but the character’s villainy in “Despicable Me” is played for laughs.
Gru (Steve Carell) fancies himself a great villain and wants to cement his supervillainy once and for all. But, in a race to steal, of all things, the moon, competing supervillain Vector (Jason Segel) secures the shrink-ray, without which neither villain would be able to steal anything bigger than a burger.
As he tries to retrieve the shrink-ray, Gru ends up befriending, then adopting, three orphan girls who are out selling cookies: Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier), and Agnes (Elsie Fisher). He’s drawn to their innocence, while they, hungering for a caring father-figure, find the perfect dad in Gru.
With the children soon filling his life, Gru’s wicked world turns upside down. He indulges them at every turn. He sets up bunkbeds, gets little Edith a new toy, rustles up special meals for them, takes them to dance classes, and takes them for rides in a fun-park.
Vexed, Vector figures that the way to edge Gru out of the supervillain race is to hit him where it hurts most and kidnaps the girls. As Vector predicts, Gru is willing to sacrifice anything to get the children back.
Gru’s kindness may be his weakness in the villainy stakes, but on every other score it’s his strength, and the girls love him for it. It’s a while before he recognizes his own goodness, and his desire to be the father figure that the girls want.
Remembering his own childhood proves to be a stumbling block. One evening, he reads the girls a bedtime story. Picturebook in hand, Gru rambles on about sleepy kittens but slows his rhythm and his rhyme when he comes to the mother cat’s lullaby.
“Goodnight kittens, close your eyes, sleep in peace until you rise. Though while you sleep, we are apart … your mommy loves you … with all her heart.” The girls are asleep, but Gru is wide-eyed, instantly transported to his own childhood.
Empathetic Parenting
Gru has lived with things inhabiting his world, not people. Objects fill his house: trophies, tools, weapons, ammunition, explosives, vaults. His dingy foyer is a ghostly museum of gadgets, gizmos and guns. Newspaper clippings that line his walls boast of his heists: “Gru Strikes Again!,” “Villain of the Year,” “What Will He Do Next?”
Reputation, not relationships, draw Gru and Vector together into this competition. Gru has a freeze-gun to freeze those who annoy him, such as those in a diner queue before him. Vector has a piranha-gun that fires marauding fish at those who annoy him. If anything, Vector’s impenetrable fortress and building-sized gadgets make Gru’s pad look tiny.
Amid silly but hilarious sequences, screenwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio weave into their plot something that unites audiences with Gru and Vector: rejection and disappointment in childhood. We’ve all faced it.
Yes, some grow up more (or more deeply) scarred than others, but the writers are saying that those childhood experiences have happened and are a part of one’s life. They can’t be wished away by adult achievement. Gleaming trophies can’t undo the feeling of never being good enough. Only love can do that.
Gru’s cranky mom (Julie Andrews), Vector’s evil-banker dad, Mr. Perkins (Will Arnett) and overbearing orphanage matron Ms. Hattie (Kristen Wiig) exemplify adults who undermine the efforts and dreams of kids under their care.
Tough guy Gru, moved by the charm of his kids, offers a caring alternative: a parent who encourages the efforts of his children, places their happiness above his own, and doesn’t fuss about success or failure. It’s where Gru breaks the mold, and chooses people and relationships over Vector’s lonesome obsessions of objects and achievements.
At first, rules dominate Gru’s interactions with the kids, “You will not cry or whine or laugh or giggle or sneeze or burp.” Later, he finds it in himself to love them, even when they break his rules. He knows, from his own cheerless childhood, that he ought to love them whether or not they keep his rules.
Finally, his pretended icy severity melts. During later bedtime story times, he movingly improvises on that first bedtime story in a way that betrays his affection for the children and what they really mean to him.
There’s a funny sequence where Gru is picking up and putting away toys that the girls have strewn around. His trusted sci-fi lieutenant Dr. Nefario triumphantly announces a date for their moon heist, but finds Gru hemming and hawing.
Furious, Nefario asks, “Please tell me this is not as a result of the girls’ dance recital. Is it?” Gru dismisses the suggestion, but Nefario sees through him, as we do.
If you’ve read Oliver Goldsmith’s essay, “The Character of the Man in Black,” you’ll catch a bit of the film’s drift. Goldsmith’s astute sketch is of a kind man who pretends to be a misanthrope, merely to hide his bleeding heart.
In the film Gru wears black. His house, in a row of white houses, is black. And, like Goldsmith’s tragicomic figure, the “ruthless” Gru turns out to be a kindly hero beneath all that affected villainy.
