In Josh Cooley’s film, the old characters meet an improvised toy named Forky.
Three stooges, four Gospels. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, preferably with four horses attached. Nine lives per cat. Some statistics are set in stone, and admirers of the “Toy Story” franchise have spent years under the distinct impression that “Toy Story 3” (2010) marked the end of the affair. Nobody watching “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” (2003) envisaged a quiet coda, in which Frodo Baggins retrains as a chiropodist, and few of us, similarly, were banking on the revival of Woody, Buzz, and the gang. Yet here they are, in “Toy Story 4,” and here we go again.
Cynics, hunting for a motive behind this fourth installment, will note that the first three films raked in nearly two billion dollars. (And that’s not counting the merchandisers who got to work, selling toys based on toys to toy collectors. Tough gig.) The promise of further raking must have been hard to resist. Narratologists will try a different tack, asking how conclusive the trilogy really was. Toys that were loved and lost, then found and loved again, during “Toy Story” (1995) and “Toy Story 2” (1999), wound up, as the third movie drew to a close, not unloved but loved by someone new—a child other than their original owner. This consoling, not to say karmic, sendoff was widely hailed as peak Pixar; only a company from the Bay Area could have spawned the concept that love means regular recycling. So, how about one more spin for luck?
“Toy Story 4” is directed by Josh Cooley, and it must be said that, for a while, the tale doesn’t seem like the freshest that Pixar has ever told. Woody (voiced by Tom Hanks, as ever), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and their bunch of pals are forced to adjust when young Bonnie (Madeleine McGraw), in whose bedroom they reside, departs for orientation day at kindergarten and returns with a toy—or a thingamajig—that she has made. His name is Forky (Tony Hale), he was put together from cutlery, pipe cleaners, and goggly eyes, and he clings to a fervent belief that he is trash. Time and again, despite not having read Dostoyevsky, he has to be stopped from throwing himself away. Parents with children of Bonnie’s age may find these scenes difficult to explain.
What’s familiar here is not the plot but the emotional texture. Bonnie’s feelings are invested in Forky, and the other toys are pushed to one side—not superseded, exactly, just not as super as they used to be. The trouble is that this exclusion drama is a retread of the original “Toy Story,” in which Woody had to make way for the splendiferous Buzz. Likewise, when some of Bonnie’s toys get trapped in an antique store, two more pre-used tropes come into play. First, inherited from “Toy Story 2,” is the notion of toys becoming vintage items, and second is the discomforting presence of über-toys, who lord it over the meeker types and forbid them basic liberties. In “Toy Story 3,” that dark political privilege fell to a fluffy bear who smelled of strawberries; this time, authority rests with Gabby Gabby (Christina Hendricks), a glass-eyed doll of yesteryear, who has a busted voice box and badly needs a working one to replace it. Like Woody’s.
Gabby Gabby is guarded by henchmen: ventriloquist’s dummies whose lurching gait suggests that, in a far-off act of vengeance, a gangster doll broke their legs. If I were six years old, I’d crouch under my seat at the sight of them, although, as viewers of “Dead of Night” (1945) can tell you, automatonophobia is nothing new. What is fresh about “Toy Story 4”—what corrals a sheepish story and goads it into action—is Bo Peep (Annie Potts). Absent from the previous film, she rocks up here as a rogue toy, who has gone awol, ditched her polka-dotted skirt for blue pants, and overcome the addictive need to be owned. She is now, in the truest sense, self-possessed. Even more amazing, to Woody’s disbelief, she appears to like it that way.
I have admired Bo Peep since the start of “Toy Story,” when she sashayed past a stack of alphabet bricks, glanced back at Woody, and crooned, “I’m just a couple of blocks away.” I remember thinking, O.K., it’s going to be that sort of movie: smart and shiny, with wits like pushpins and eyes peeled for every possible gag. Give me more. What I didn’t foresee was that, in the ensuing years, the “Toy Story” saga would dig around in the treasure chest of our lifelong obsessions—friendship, loss, the joyous longevity of our attachments, and, conversely, the dread of obsolescence—and, in the process, put to shame half of the allegedly grownup films that Hollywood supplies. The heart has its reasons, and those reasons have been most searchingly explored not by romantic comedies, snuffling weepies, or the phantasmagoria of Marvel but by the exploits of a battery-powered spaceman and a cowboy with a pull string in his back.
Thus, as Cooley’s film quickens and deepens, we get a fabulous running joke about the “inner voice,” a staple of American self-will since the days of Emerson. Buzz is advised to harken to his voice before making any decisions, and so he keeps jabbing at the button on his chest—the one that issues astro-commands, instructing him to return to base, or whatever. “Thanks, Inner Voice!” he cries, and sprints off. Will the purveyors of self-help books, and their millions of pliable readers, curl up like snails as they watch him? I hope so. Then, there’s a new toy in town: Duke Caboom, Canada’s answer to Evel Knievel, sublimely voiced by Keanu Reeves, and stricken by the awareness that he cannot perform the stunts for which he was designed. Tell me about it.
The climax of “Toy Story 4” takes place in an amusement park, with a giddy carrousel and a nod to “Strangers on a Train” (1951). Pixar likes to dish out an extra treat during the end credits, and I was wondering what form of farewell we’d get on this occasion. An environmental envoi, perhaps, with Buzz washed up on a beach alongside other jetsam, or clogging the gullet of a whale? (After all, the durable quality of plastic, once a bonus, is now perceived as a global threat.) In the event, we get something sadder still. Stick around, and you will be rewarded with a brief but remarkable conversation on the nature of existence. One toy poses a question, which I will not disclose, and another replies, “I don’t know.” Socrates would be proud of them. To unfathomability, and beyond! And that, at last, for now, is that.
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A bold young woman, from a lowly background, gets to sing at the Grand Ole Opry. That was what happened to Loretta Lynn, played by Sissy Spacek, in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” (1980), and it happens to Rose-Lynn Harlan, played by Jessie Buckley, in “Wild Rose.” One small discrepancy: the Grand Ole Opry in the first film was the Opry, in Nashville, Tennessee, whereas the Opry in the new film is in Glasgow, Scotland, next to a hair-and-beauty salon called Indulge.
It doesn’t take long, in Tom Harper’s movie, to learn quite a bit about Rose-Lynn. Within five minutes, we see her being fitted with an electronic ankle monitor, leaving jail (we know nothing as yet of her crime), having sex in a public park, and showing up at the house where her two children, aged eight and five, have been cared for by her mother, Marion (Julie Walters). Rose-Lynn has almost forgotten how to talk to her own kids.
She gets a job as a cleaner, in a plush home with electronic gates. Her employer is the graceful Susannah (Sophie Okonedo), and you can feel the gulf that separates them—the unbridgeable distance between what each of them has been taught to expect from life—in the clash of Susannah’s cheerful English tones and the thorny roughness of Rose-Lynn’s Glaswegian brogue. Her plan is to fly to Nashville and seek her fate, and she bluntly proposes that Susannah, who is surrounded by costly things, should give her loads of money to go there: “All the wee smelly candles burning everywhere an’ bottled water an’ all that, you know, you wouldn’t miss it. I’ll be old an’ gray before I save the money, whereas you—you could just drink oot of the tap.” No arguing with that.
Guess what? The plan comes to pass, though not in the way that Rose-Lynn anticipated. Harper’s film, written by Nicole Taylor, is an odd concoction. On the one hand, it obeys the standard doctrine of follow-your-dream. Notice the sunlight, for example, that hazes the heroine’s face as she carols “Peace in This House,” and listen to Susannah giving her the big boost—“There is nothing you can’t do. This is your time.” On the other hand, we have Jessie Buckley, who, in adding “Wild Rose” to her leading role in “Beast” (2018), confirms that she is a specialist in the untamed. (Next year, she’ll star with Robert Downey, Jr., in “The Voyage of Doctor Dolittle.” More wildlife.) As Rose-Lynn, stomping along in white cowboy boots, she is ballsy and fiery, at once wised up and dangerously immature. Does she sing “I’m Movin’ On” while vacuuming the rug, whipping the power cord like a lasso? Damn right she does. Would Woody, from “Toy Story,” take one look at her and ride for the hills? Yes, sir. ♦
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