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What’s the opposite of D’Oh? Y’Oh! Wh’oh! G’oh! The Simpsons are finally, triumphantly, here, after much whingeing and whispering that we’ve all got Simpsons fatigue and that the movie was only going to be a feature-length version of the TV show.
To which I can only say “only?” It’s only going to be superbly funny and well-written all the way through? With a creative IQ that easily outpaces 99 per cent of everything else Hollywood churns out? And as for Simpsons fatigue, I was too busy laughing to notice any.
For 17 long years The Simpsons has not been turned into a film, and that single fact is often held up as proof that it is the very epitome of televisual perfection. The show has outlasted two American presidents and a Pope. It predated the Internet.
While fractured, dysfunctional households in the real world had kids that watched TV in their rooms, The Simpsons rushed home to gather round the family set, without video or Sky+, like the nuclear families of old.
Over the years liberals have learned to clench their teeth and admit that it was News Corp’s demon king Rupert Murdoch who sponsored the world’s greatest TV programme.
In the cinema South Park the Movie came and went and even The Flintstones was permitted a live-action movie airing, an extraordinary error of taste which is only attributable to an overspill of frustrated yearning for Springfield’s First Family.
The Toy Stories, Shrek, The Incredibles and Finding Nemo all grew to maturity in cinema’s digital arena, and then the CGI family-comedy boom faded. And all the while, The Simpsons just kept going, a perpetual motion machine of intelligent comedy, though perhaps without the full bloom of its early greatness.
And now, at last, Matt Groening’s brilliant creation has arrived in cinemas, dated only in the sense that we all know it began in 1990, but otherwise terrifically funny and contemporary.
Though I admit: after this vast historical wait, there is a tiny bit of a letdown, only because The Simpsons Movie just can’t offer the shock of the new which is such a part of the moviegoing experience. And one gag is recycled: Homer again attempts to soar over Springfield gorge, Evel Knievel-style, with the same anti-climatic results.
But we’ve been spoiled by so much quality. The gags are razor-sharp and lightning-swift; they keep coming, and the writing just puts everything else to shame, in the cinema just as on television.
I watched the screen with my eyes darting all over the place, not wanting to miss a single sight-gag. And in fact there is something hallucinatory in seeing the characters at giant size, especially swooping through the landscape for the (modified) opening credits. When Lisa’s yellow face fills the screen for the first time it’s like some sort of acid trip.
The story is too silly and involved to summarise, but it involves Homer rescuing his family and saving Springfield from a grotesque conspiracy by President Arnold Schwarzenegger to despoil the environment – a president who declines to consult any briefing document: “I vos elected to lead, not read!”
It cheerfully alludes to Dr Strangelove, Spellbound, and The Truman Show, though Groening leaves unsolved the puzzle of whether his creation was in any way inspired by Homer Simpson, the dopey midwestern accountant in Nathanael West’s Hollywood novel The Day of the Locust.
Unfortunately there isn’t much screen time for the show’s greatest villain, nuclear plant supremo Montgomery Burns, though Burns has one outstanding line. Relishing a moment of power over his fellow Springfielders, he sneers: “So! For once the rich white man is in control!”
Police Chief Whiggum has what is probably the best single gag, munching doughnuts off the barrel of his gun, and almost blowing his head off when his mobile phone goes off: “Whew! That was a close one!”
Undoubtedly, reconfiguring The Simpsons as a feature film has meant scaling back the ensemble of minor characters and building up the conventional drama within the family itself; this has meant some sacrifices but it is brilliantly done, especially the agonising relationship between Marge and her daughter Lisa, who is embarking on a romance with a handsome young Irish boy.
Marge looks on, all too aware of the excruciating disappointments that men can inflict on a young female heart. “I’m so angry!” sobs Lisa to her. “You’re a woman,” says Marge solemnly, “you can hold it in for ever.”
Homer is a joy whenever he’s on, especially when he conceives an inappropriate love for a pig.
When they watch an erotic moment on TV, Homer turns wonderingly to the pig and says: “Maybe we should kiss to break the tension...”
Marge comes back just in time: “What’s going on here?” A huge laugh.
So many movies promise what they could never deliver in a million years.
The Simpsons movie gives you everything you could possibly want, and maybe it’s a victim of its own gargantuan accomplishment. Eighty-five minutes is not long enough to do justice to 17 years of comedy genius.
It’s still great stuff. Like Homer with his nachos, I could gobble it up until nightfall.
By Peter Bradshaw
