The Muppets

First thing's first: I left the theater last night after having seen The Muppets feeling almost exactly like this.

I grew up with the Muppets. The Muppet Movie and The Muppets Take Manhattan were family favorites when I was little. I absorbed Muppet Babies and reruns of The Muppet Show on TV when I was in elementary school. However, I recognize that this isn't the case for everybody in my generation. I had to orchestrate a mass viewing of The Muppet Movie my senior year of undergrad after realizing -- to my dismay -- that only a couple of my friends had ever seen it. All of them knew the Muppets. They'd seen Muppet Treasure Island / Christmas Carol / In Space growing up, but they didn't share my boundless love for these timeless pieces of felt. The reason, pretty simply, was because they'd never seen the Muppets under the direction of Jim Henson.

Henson's unexpected death in 1990 necessarily resulted in a shift in all Muppet related work. Without their chief visionary around, it was nearly impossible to recreate the whimsical sincerity that made the Muppets what they are. They could pull off the tongue-in-cheek goofy self-awareness, but there was something lacking in the joy department of everything that has come in the past two decades. The Muppets is a very strong step towards rectifying that.

The basic plot of the movie suggests that something has happened to fundamentally alter the relationship that the Muppets share, driving them apart. Into this world walk Gary, Mary, and, most importantly, Walter. These are agents external to the Muppet community who recognize the impact the Muppets have had on society, and who intervene to help the Muppets move beyond whatever happened and realize that they can still accomplish a lot of good together.

This could be seen as mirroring the making of this production. The event that drove the Muppets apart could, implicitly, be understood as the loss of Henson. There have been Muppet creations in the last 20 years, but plenty of people would be happy writing them off. Into this void walked Jason Segel and his partners (including plenty of writing and directing talent from Flight of the Concords), eager to show the world that it was still possible to capture the original spirit of the Muppets. Willing to show them the respect that they deserve both as performers and characters.

No matter what Rotten Tomatoes might say, The Muppets is not as good as The Muppet Movie. Henson's passing still weighs too heavily on this franchise for that to be the case. There's something obviously different about this movie than the Henson Muppet cannon. Chiefly, the Muppets themselves (or at least the original Muppets) aren't front and center they way they would have been years ago. They play a prominent role and take up much of the screen time, but by and large, this is a movie from the perspective of outsiders. But in a world without Jim Henson...it kind of has to be. We can't replicate his magic, his boundless idealism tempered by patient realism. We can only endeavor to describe how it made (and continues to make) us feel and provide our best recreation.

On that account, The Muppets succeeds as well as any effort could. Bolstered by incredibly eager contributions from the always sincere Jason Segel and Amy Adams, there is a hopeful, joyous quality to this movie that can only be described as Muppetacular. Having seen it once, I'm fully confident that I'll see it at least once more, and possibly twice before it leaves theaters.