Too little wonder in this 'Emporium'
"Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" works like a bad horror movie where the filmmakers, striving to achieve a nightmarish quality, don't bother to ground their story in any sense of reality because they erroneously don't think they need it.
Likewise, director/writer Zach Helm doesn't bother to ground his "Wonder Emporium" in any sense of reality for similar reasons -- hey, it's a children's fantasy. Who needs reality?
Uh, he does. Especially if he wants us to become filled with the sense of awe and wonder that he obviously intends for his film to inspire.
Instead, Helm winds up with a movie that works so hard to be magical and mystical and mesmerizing that it forgets to be any of these things and winds up being an orgiastic toy spectacle devoid of emotion, plot and interesting characters.
The premise: A 243-year-old man named Edward Magorium (Dustin Hoffman sporting electro-shock hair and a lispy, singsong voice) decides to retire from his beloved New York toy store, a place filled with absurd merchandise such as living fish mobiles (do babies love those?) and energized balls with a will of their own.
Magorium intends to transfer the management over to his reluctant protégé, Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman), who has worked at Mr. Magorium's emporium while attempting to launch a career as a musician.
To aid in the transfer, Magorium hires an accountant named Henry Weston (Jason Bateman, looking appropriately bankerly) to put the books in order, something that hasn't been done in about two centuries. A humorless man, Weston can't see the emporium's magic right under his nose.
The emporium attracts a lot of people, including young Eric Applebaum (Zach Mills), a quiet and reserved lad with a really big hat collection. He gets the job of narrating "Wonder Emporium" and dividing the story into cleverly titled chapters.
Right off the Whiffle ball bat, Mr. Magorium announces that he intends to leave the store, a thinly veiled euphemism for "he's going to die." Immediately, the emporium itself starts to react violently to this news, forming a residue in the corner that looks like sewage from the house in "The Amityville Horror."
Helm, a DePaul University grad, knows what a child's fantasy film is supposed to look like but has crafted a story without any dramatic conflict. He has no conventional villain, which isn't a bad thing, but substitutes nothing in its place to create tension or sustained interest.
Is Mr. Magorium there to tell children that death is a natural event that can be faced without fear? Could the suggested, but never realized, romance between Molly and Weston be a metaphor for how the right half and left half of a brain can combine to complete a whole person with logic and imagination?
That's the problem with "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium." Magorium and the emporium are present and accounted for.
The wonder is missing in action.
"Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium"
Two stars out of four
Opens today
Dustin Hoffman as Mr. Magorium
Natalie Portman as Molly Mahoney
Jason Bateman as Henry Weston
Zach Mills as Eric Applebaum
Written and directed by Zach Helm. Produced by Richard N. Glastein and James Garavente. A 20th Century Fox release. Rated G. Running time: 94 minutes.