by Brett Parker
In an age where it feels like every possible angle on zombies has been done to death (no pun intended), along comes Warm Bodies, which offers up the wildly incongruent perspective of the zombie as anguished romantic hero. Seeing as how zombies are inherently rotting human carcasses who can’t exist without devouring living human flesh like a fat kid at a pie eating contest, having them fall helplessly in love with their food John Hughes-style sounds too ridiculously implausible to work. But in an age where nonsense like Twilight has proven to be a smash, anything is possible, right? So it’s bewildering as much as it is refreshing that Warm Bodies actually works as a film miles more than you’d expect. No one ever really suspected that a shotgun marriage between George A. Romero and Cameron Crowe could gel, but maybe it’s just what this genre’s doctor ordered.
The film opens in what appears to be the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse in America. We meet R (Nicholas Hoult) a teenage zombie who can’t remember what his first name was when he was human, but he thinks it began with an “R.” We see R as he conducts his daily routine of scrummaging through the North American wasteland with other decaying zombies looking for live humans to feast on. He considers M (Rob Corddry) his best friend, but they’re too dehumanized to muster up a coherent conversation. R has made an abandoned airplane his home, which is filled with relics of former civilization that include a record player and a vinyl collection. Listening to what music used to be (which includes Bruce Springsteen amongst R’s records) causes R to pine for human feelings that he used to feel. R spends his days wondering whether or not he could ever overcome his undead condition to act like a normal, full-blooded person ever again.
Things change dramatically for R when he goes out one day to hunt for flesh with his fellow zombies. He meets Julie (Teresa Palmer), a pretty blonde fighter for a band of uninfected humans trying to survive in their post-apocalyptic world. As the other zombies feast on Julie’s friends, R is hit with feelings of romanticism instead of feelings of hunger for her. R tries his very best to convey a sense of human decency through his rotting exterior and he’s miraculously able to convince Julie that there’s remnants of a spirit inside of him. Pretty soon, a peculiar courtship develops where R tries to convey his surprising romantic feelings towards Julie while she hopes to find a way to bring whatever heart and soul remains in him to the forefront. Julie’s Dad, Grigio (John Malkovich), is the leader of the human resistance against zombies and R has the blonde warrior hoping to convince her father that zombies aren’t hopeless demons that have to be exterminated but could probably become human again with traditional feelings of love.
What’s so enduring about the zombie genre is how shrewdly oozing corpses have consistently served as the perfect metaphors for the trials and tribulations of American society. Since Romero’s pioneering heyday, zombies have kindly offered us reflective commentaries on post-war trauma, consumerism, nuclear anxieties, social unrest, government corruption, mob mentality, and even crackpot Americana resourcefulness when depicted as comedy. Perhaps Warm Bodies never feels as fully preposterous as it should because the repressed zombies on display perfectly depict present-day American people: numbed-out slugs trudging through a compromised existence yearning unconsciously for an emotional connection and nourishment of the heart. The story gets its juice from the realization that if you were to ask a random zombie “what’s on your mind?,” then you’d probably get the same cryptic answers as any disillusioned American of today asked the same question. To say that all a zombie needs is a lot of tender, love, and care to cure his problems may seem like a hell of a theoretical stretch, but the fact that most of the audience watching the film could use the same kind of medicine these days gives Warm Bodies an emotional connection that spares it from being completely vapid.
Warm Bodies is perhaps as surprisingly engaging as it is because director Jonathan Levine sees this tale as just another one of his trademark riffs on young men trying to find solid emotional ground in an increasingly confusing world. Like a teenager trying to deal with youthful angst (The Wackness) or a young man battling cancer (50/50), Levine depicts R’s view of his own zombie condition as an inconvenient affliction that can perhaps be overcome with the right emotional mindset. If Levine’s heroes are males trying to retain a strong sense of self as they fight for normalcy amongst bewildering circumstances, then his themes are put to the ultimate test here since zombieitis could be considered the ultimate threat to those very ideals. Of course, reducing the entire zombie experience down to a young man’s coming-of-age quest to find emotional fulfillment sidesteps a ton of hellish circumstances naturally inherent in the basic concept of a zombie tale, but it sure does bring a lot of empathetic juice to a lunatic cinematic concept. Plus it offers moments of cockeyed beauty rarely felt in this genre, as when R is drawn to the positive vibes he feels when he plays his vinyl records or when R’s newfound romance inspires the other zombies around him to feel all tingly at the sight of a poster depicting a romantic couple on a beach.
To whatever extent this crackpot tale actually works, most credit can be given to Nicholas Hoult and the tricky sympathy he blasts through the guise of being a rotting corpse. The trouble with a zombie being a romantic hero is the inherent lack of romanticism in their appearance, for ultra-pale skin, decaying flesh, and demonic eyes are hardly considered dreamboat traits. Yet Hoult is able to make all of those things feel like it’s part of a disheveled, lonely teenager package and is able to generate a Quasimodo-style sincerity with it all. His voice-over narration has a charmingly down-to-earth quirkiness about his ordeal, kind of like a post-apocalyptic Lloyd Dobler. A scene in which Julie and a friend give him a shower and cover him with make-up offers up a rare moment in the zombie genre: one of heart-warming uplift. As the lady love R pines for, Teresa Palmer proves here as she did in Take Me Home Tonight that she is a suitable throwback to that ancient Hollywood tradition of having a pretty blonde with inklings of spunk as the ultimate romantic holy grail. If Julie is lacking in the personality department, then that makes sense seeing as how R would have a hard time dealing with a real ball of feministic fire. Katherine Hepburn, for example, would make him give up and just start eating her out of inadequacy. Julie feels like the perfect starter girlfriend until more of his lost humanity kicks in. If their tender courtship scenes seems like pretty basic stuff, then they feel all the more impressive once you grasp the unlikely bizarreness they grew out of.
It’s not hard to suspect that a work like Warm Bodies was most likely concocted as a result of the Twilight series wild success, but I couldn’t help but notice that this zombie tale smokes the vampire one on its own ideological grounds. My biggest qualm with Twilight is its heavy reliance on numbskull logistics and overdone romantic pulp to distract from the hard answers to the premise’s central question: why would a monster fall in love with his own food? From where I sit, Warm Bodies answers such a preposterous question with a lot more tenderness, humor, and level-headedness. Twilight makes the mistake of taking its ridiculous world so dreadfully seriously while the joy of Warm Bodies is its comic curiosity and gaga hopefulness about whether or not a zombie could actually fall in love. That you can kind of halfway believe they could is the film’s ultimate success.
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