Bean’s Silly Pantomime Earns Chuckles
Mr. Bean’s Holiday
(PG; 86 minutes)
English comic actor Rowan Atkinson has played a lot of characters (our absolute favorite is the one in 1989’s “The Tall Guy”). But he’s best known for a durable creation called Mr. Bean. A TV series, an animated kiddie show and a previous feature (”Bean”) helped establish the gawky, mostly nonverbal clown as an idiot supreme — a nincompoop with attitude.
Atkinson brings back Bean in “Mr. Bean’s Holiday,” an obvious allusion to “Mr. Hulot’s Holiday,” the 1953 Jacque Tati classic. The formats are similar, but Bean’s repertoire is, shall we say, far less subtle than his French predecessor’s.
This “Holiday” is pure slapstick. It’s stupid stuff but you’ll laugh anyway. Like silent masters Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd, Atkinson relies on elaborate set-ups, loony body language and facial contortions (he has a wonderfully homely visage) to deliver one visual smack in the head after another.
He wins a raffle and heads to the south of France. So much for plot. Oh, yeah, he winds up being falsely accused of kidnapping — this is after he loses his money, passport and train ticket — so he’s sort of a clueless fugitive with a juvenile sidekick.
Bean barely speaks English — his vocalizations are guttural growls and grunts for the most part – so he’s totally lost in France. Some joke. The sight gags are the ones that work best. We like his walk to the beach in Cannes and his inadvertent editing of a pompous director’s new work. (Willem Dafoe is a grandly counterintuitive choice to play the self-appointed genius.)
While Atkinson’s Bean isn’t our favorite film funnyman, we have to admit he made us chuckle a lot in a fast 86 minutes. Even better, my mom cackled delightedly through the whole thing, and that’s worth something extra. So we give this silly man a C+.
