Warm Bodies is a fun little mash-up of a film that’s part
indie romance, part zombie-apocalypse flick, and part Shakespeare. I’m not
kidding. It’s surprisingly charming.
The movie begins by introducing us to a dissatisfied young
man (Nicholas Hoult) whose thoughts we get via voice-over. He’s bored, lonely,
and looking for a little more from his existence. The kicker is that he’s dead.
A victim of a vaguely-recalled zombie-apocalypse scenario, our young hero is,
in fact, a shuffling and groaning animated corpse. He doesn’t say much out loud.
He doesn’t even remember his name, though he’s pretty sure it began with an R
(but what’s in a name, right?). R spends most of his time mindlessly roaming an
abandoned airport with other zombies (he’s made a sort of bachelor pad out of a
grounded plane), some of whom he kind of interacts with. He has a “best friend,”
M (Rob Corddry). They sit together at the airport bar, stare at empty glasses,
and moan. Sometimes, they get hungry, and then hunt down the living—whom they
eat, especially the brains. It’s not a bad, for unlife—but R wants more.
Then “more” crosses his path in the form of Julie (Teresa Palmer),
who is cute, blonde, and equally dissatisfied – but happens to be a living,
breathing human. She’s the daughter of the gung-ho leader of the local zombie
fighting movement (an unusually toned-down John Malkovich), and on a foray into
zombie territory for medical supplies, she and her fellows are ambushed by R,
M, and their brain-hungry brethren. Somehow, R is smitten, and, in a fit of
unusually human feeling, brings Julie back to his plane instead of eating her.
What follows is a delightful sequence in which the two,
communicating using short phrases, gestures, and R’s record collection (J: “What’s
with all the vinyl? Couldn’t find an iPod?” R: “Better…sound…”) strike up a
very unlikely relationship. Where this relationship goes and the effects it has
on each of them and their worlds is part of the fun of the movie, so I will
stop summarizing here. But if the names “R” and “Julie” aren’t triggering some
associations for you by now, march back to your high school lit class and
demand a refund.
A certain amount the charm of Warm Bodies comes from the
script itself (penned by director Jonathan Levine and based on a novel by Isaac
Marion, unread by me), which pokes sly fun at all the genres involved. R
bemoans the slow pace of zombie movement, for example, and the music is used in
such obvious romantic-soundtrack fashion that characters actually comment on
it. Plus, there’s that Shakespeare play lurking in the background. But the
acting also deserves a lot of credit. Hoult brings to R some of the geeky charm
that John Hughes heroes used to exhibit, and there’s something both sweet and
practical about Palmer’s Julie. Surely a girl’s standards might be a tad
different after an apocalypse. And as the obligatory best friends, Corddry and
Analeigh Tipton provide solid, eccentric support for Hoult and Palmer
respectively.
One of the great surprises of the film, though, is that it
allows itself to be smart. Zombies onscreen have always been metaphors of some
kind – for communists, say, or consumerism – and there’s some of that here.
Notice how both R’s fellow undead and Julie’s zombie-fighter comrades seem
rather mindlessly fixated, and notice how the same thing might be a cure for each
side. And notice what the movie does with the idea of real connection – zombies
who can ignore each other while literally bumping into one another (in an
airport, no less!) versus something as simple as a handshake. These are things,
however, that occurred to me after the fact, which is to say that Warm Bodies
does have space for some subtlety – which is to also say that this is a
well-made film for something that’s basically light entertainment.
This is not a perfect film – a few clichés sneak in, and the
truly evil dead (skeletons called “Bonies”) aren’t always well-served by their
CGI composition – but it’s certainly more than I would have expected from a “zombie
romantic comedy.” It’s got heart and, ahem, brains. And, yes, it is a comedy. I
certainly don’t want to spoil anything – I’ll just leave you to consider what
might have to be reworked in a classic tragedy when one of the protagonists
starts off dead…
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