‘WALL•E’ a brilliant heartbreaker

Andrew Stanton’s “WALL•E” possesses such an unparalleled political sharpness that it’s easy to get ahead of yourself in trying to describe it: “BnL,” an ultra-consumerist mega-corporation, has conquered the country’s (the world’s?) government sometime in the near future; having exhausted the planet’s resources, BnL sends the entire human race onto the Axiom, a spaceship that promises to fulfill its inhabitants’ every need.

Once the powers-that-be determine the planet to be unsalvagable after several years of attempted clean-up, the CEO/President (Fred Willard, in live-action) stumbles through a speech insisting that we must “stay the course”—a decree that stands for seven centuries, just enough time for humanity to devolve into bug-eyed, amorphous blobs, drunk on its own excess as technology replaces the need for anything resembling ambition or physical interaction. It’s almost too much to process in a single viewing of the film. But at the film’s core is a deceptively simple love story—at once an easygoing entry point into greater intellectual territory and, to put it mildly, one of the most touching, heartbreaking films in recent memory.

The titular robot is the last of his kind—a sentient, box-like trash compactor who has spent the last seven hundred years cleaning up mankind’s messes while staving off his building loneliness by rescuing interesting objects from the rubble and watching “Hello, Dolly!” on a rusty old videotape ad infinitum. However, WALL•E’s repetitive little niche suffers a fatal interruption with the arrival of EVE, a trigger-happy pod-robot deposited on Earth to perform some classified directive. There is something indescribable about the scenes that follow—a certain purity in EVE and WALL•E’s budding romance that recalls the most touching moments from Chaplin’s Little Tramp films. It’s as if Stanton is making a serious claim that we can somehow resurrect the silent film, that we can pare the silver screen down to its barest essentials as a medium of memorable faces (a particularly impressive feat considering that both EVE and WALL•E are limited to their expressive eyes) and small, selfless gestures. However, this approach also forces you to treasure the moments when words are exchanged; dialogue in these scenes is mostly limited to recitations of the robots’ own names, by turns pathetic and full of longing—I concede that it was almost impossible not to tear up whenever they spoke in those worbling mechanical voices.

EVE’s mission has something to do with the small sapling that WALL•E has saved from the trash heap—and soon they are both whisked away to the Axiom, where they encounter the bloated human race and immediately wreak havoc on their too-comfortable Utopia. The sudden shift in tone doesn’t ruin the moment, however, because it simply expands its emotional connection into broader territory as characters come crashing into each others’ lives. As everyone gradually becomes injected with a healthy sense of self-awareness, “WALL•E” tackles nothing less than the idea that we cannot truly evolve until we learn to love and empathize with our fellow man: it was not until WALL•E met EVE that he could hoist himself out of his lonely rut; it was not until EVE met WALL•E that she could shed her destructive itch; and, finally, humanity isn’t worthy of redemption until the two robots rock their antiseptic world and force them to interact with one another. The film is, in many ways, the emotional completion of the artistic revolution that propelled Brad Bird’s “Ratatouille:” it’s far too easy to blindly accept what you have, no matter how asinine or mediocre that may be. Apathy can wash over you and disconnect you from reality, but perhaps that is the nature of any being given the gift of life and personality, forced to look out exclusively for their own interests. (Furthermore, no matter what we may learn about ourselves, the end credits subtly imply that we are constantly in flux between evolution and devolution.) But attendant to the acceptance of that fact is the vague, almost unspeakable hope that we can break away from our own little tunnel vision, look around and discover the wonderful people and places that drift through our lives.