The Muppets creator and 'Sesame Street' innovator gets a reverential and very authorized two-hour celebration, featuring family and collaborators.
, but perhaps not documentaries made with the full involvement of the Henson family, access to the Henson archives and an easy avenue to broadcast on Disney+.Film Festival in the Cannes Classics sidebar, it’s a soft and fairly satisfying movie — one with a great and well-earned appreciation for the man being chronicled, but very little of Henson’s boundary-breaking spirit.is a very conventional movie that dedicates its time to proving how unconventional Jim Henson was.
I guess you could say that as the film shows Henson going more mainstream, or the mainstream assimilating Henson, Howard’s approach becomes more mainstream. But it’s much more that once he has the opportunity to fall back on both previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage and endlessly deployedsketches, Howard is happy to let them speak to and represent Henson’s genius without needing to embellish.
The talking heads are varied, but almost none of them dig especially deep, and there’s an odd resistance to storytelling in favor of general platitudes about genius and persistence and childlike spirit. Four of Henson’s five children are on-camera, and they speak of their father with love, but with more specificity about him as a mentor — they all have gone into some variation of the family business — than as a paternal figure.
I think a better documentary would feature more of Oz and Henson’s various collaborators and maybe push the Henson children to give answers that are less about bland recitations of their father’s biography and more about experiences with him. None of that would require any more negativity or criticism thanpossesses.
The documentary delivers less perspective on Henson’s personality and motivations than sheer evidence of his drive. That’s fine, and the documentary is fine. Anybody with affection for Henson and his work will get the requisite laughs, nostalgia and probably emotions from the footage Howard assembled here. Deeper understanding will have to wait.
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