Muppet Review 2: The Great Muppet Caper

A while back, I wrote a blog entry praising the virtues of the Sesame Street movie, Follow That Bird, so it should be no shock to anyone -- especially anyone who has known me for a long time -- that I love The Great Muppet Caper. When I was a kid, I loved it because it featured my beloved Muppets, whom, without exaggeration, I considered a second family when I was young. Now that I'm an adult, I admire it for an entirely different reason, a reason that almost contradicts the first: In a way, this isn't really a Muppet movie at all.

Now, I know that may seem preposterous -- the Muppets are, after all, the stars of this movie, and take center stage in nearly every scene -- but hear me out. This movie may have been written with the Muppets in mind, but watching it tonight, I realized that it would take very, very little rewriting to plug in human stars instead of the felt guys. Oh, sure, some of the jokes are too character specific to apply to anyone but the Muppets -- Animal's still got a crazy appetite, frog and bear jokes abound, and so on -- but most of the dialogue, both comical and serious, could be taken verbatim and put into human actor's mouths, with equal effect. The comedy is an effective mixture of styles -- absurdist humor, clever word-play, sharp observation, and an occasional breaking of the fourth wall all vie for dominance in the screenplay's arsenal. But despite the Muppet reputation for wackiness, the script never devolves into Naked Gun level silliness.

The plot is equally sophistocated. Fozzie Bear (Frank Oz) and Kermit the Frog (Jim Henson) play two New York City newspaper reporters who are also brothers (the fact that they look nothing alike, and are even different species, is hilariously both acknowledged and dismissed as irrelevant to their claim to be identical twins). Together with their photographer (Gonzo the Great), Fozzie and Kermit are fired by their editor after they distract themselves with a mundane story and fail to notice a high-profile jewel robbery across the street. Determined to get their jobs back, the trio decide to journey to London, to interview the victim of the crime, famous fashion designer Lady Holiday (Diana Rigg). Enter Miss Piggy (also played by Frank Oz), as an American immigrant determined to become a model for Lady Holiday. Holiday instead hires Piggy as a receptionist, but when Kermit mistakes Piggy for Holiday herself, Piggy falls in love at first sight and goes to great lengths to make him continue thinking she is the famous fashion designer. A romance develops, complicated by the fact that Piggy is lying about her identity, and has to avoid Kermit's constant questions about a jewel robbery she knows nothing about.

Meanwhile, Holiday's ne'er-do-well brother Nicky (Charles Grodin, in his best performance) falls in love with Piggy, forming a love triangle that is exacerbated by the fact that Kermit knows that Nicky is actually the leader of the jewel thieves that are repeatedly targeting Lady Holiday.

Take away the bear and pig jokes, and this is the kind of old-fashioned mixture of adventure and farce that could have starred Astaire & Rogers instead of Kermit & Piggy.

Now, on a personal note, it's no secret that my desire to master puppetry was the reason that I first got interested in becoming involved in the world of entertainment. But what I never realized until tonight is that I actually learned how to write dialogue by listening to the Muppets. This self-revelation came during a scene in which Fozzie, Gonzo, and Kermit talk at cross-purposes, simultaneously discussing Miss Piggy's possible culpability in the jewel heists, trying to solve the identity of the other thieves, and engaging in small talk. The conversation's humor, and even its cadence, sounded suspiciously familiar to me, and I soon realized that this was not only because I had seen the movie many times before; what I was recognizing was a dialogue style remarkably similar to my own, when I'm at my best. So I guess I owe the Muppets more than just countless hours of entertainment. They really have helped make me who I am today.