The Addams Family

Charles Addams published his first cartoon in The New Yorker in 1932 when he was just 20 years old. By the time he died in 1988 at the age of 76, he had published over 2500 cartoons in a variety of magazines and had released 10 books of his work. His cartoons regularly featured spouses doing away with each other in assorted ways, children happily playing with poison and knives, and various ghouls and creeps talking to one another like suburban neighbors. What Addams work did not feature a lot if is the Addams family. Over the course of his entire career, he only created about 150 cartoons that featured characters we know as Gomez, Morticia, Wednesday, Pugsley, and Fester. That measly six percent of his work has spawned two live action tv shows, three live action films, an animated tv series, a Broadway musical, and now most recently, a full-length animated feature called, naturally, The Addams Family. 

 I was a huge fan of the tv show that ran from 1964 to 1966. I’m not saying I had a giant crush on Carolyn Jones as Morticia and her figure-hugging vampira dress – but I’m not saying I didn’t. The distinctive element of the television show and Addams original cartoons is how this family was utterly loving and devoted to one another in their own gleefully perverse, macabre way. Morticia and Gomez were doting parents. Wednesday and Pugsley were sweet, obedient kids. Everyone loved everyone, and the only differences between them and Ozzie and Harriet were the guillotines, explosives, evil spirits, disembodied limbs, and terrifying, zombie-like butler.

The new animated film attempts to bring the Addams Family into the 21^st century. In this iteration, their possessed, haunted mansion sits atop a hill overlooking a meticulously planned community called Assimilation. Obviously, the film isn’t going to win any points for subtlety. A reality tv home-makeover personality named Margaux Needler has built the entire town (complete with hidden cameras for her own uses) and needs to sell every house in order to not lose her tv show. The Addams family house is an eyesore and their various ghoulish relatives coming for a visit threaten Assimilation’s marketability. It’s a flimsy conceit that creates an all-too-easy, us-versus-them heavy handed metaphor about non-conformity, xenophobia, and just being yourself, man. There is also a subplot about Pugsley, voiced by Stranger Things’ Finn Wolfhard, approaching the Addams family equivalent of a bar mitzvah, a ceremony marking his transition into manhood. It involves him dancing with a sword, and he is disappointed that he’s not able to use TNT which is his weapon of choice. The story is actually the least interesting part of the film.

Visually, it is the closest adaptation of Addams’ actual drawings thus far. Gomez, voiced by Oscar Issac, looks like a gleeful ghoul, and Morticia, voiced by Charlize Theron, is elongated, paler than pale, and even more wasp-waisted than Carolyn Jones was. Their house is a delightfully dilapidated combination of rococo, Victorian, and Tim Burton. It’s fun to see Charles Addams work up on the big screen looking very much as it did on the page.

Most of the performances are just fine with one notable exception. Charlize Theron has done wonderfully evocative voice work before in her career, but here her choices seem odd. Rather than paying homage to the Morticias of the past or creating her own new take on the character, she mostly seems to be channeling Lady Mary Crawley from Downton Abbey. She sounds haughty and aristocratic and lacks the steely joy of Carolyn Jones and the impish remove of Angelica Houston. Her performance was distracting and slightly annoying.

If this new Addams Family movie introduces young people to the work of Charles Addams, the 60s tv show, or even the Barry Sonnenfeld movies of the 90s, it will have been worth it. Otherwise, wait to see it when it comes out on disc or streaming.