Be Kind, Rewind, French director Michel Gondry’s most recent film, is average as a comedy, continuing the trend started by Gondry’s last offering, the disappointing The Science of Sleep. Despite falling far short of the visual inventiveness and splendor of the acclaimed Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), though, Be Kind provides keen insight into the nature of filmmaking and the importance of community.
When Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) decides to leave town for a few days, he puts Mike (Mos Def) in charge of his small town video rental store, “Be Kind, Rewind.” Before departing, Mr. Fletcher warns Mike to keep his childish friend Jerry (Jack Black) out of the store. Needless to say, Mike fails, resulting in comedic disaster. Jerry becomes magnetized after a botched attempt to sabotage the local power plant and inadvertently erases all of the store’s VHS tapes.
When customers complain about blank rentals, Mike and Jerry are forced to come up with a quick, creative solution: recreating mainstream Hollywood movies and substituting their versions for the originals.
The town quickly embraces Mike and Jerry as local celebrities as they reproduce blockbusters like Ghost Busters, Rush Hour 2, The Lion King and Driving Ms. Daisy. While the images are bound to make viewers burst out laughing—like seeing Jack Black in a dress as he plays “Ms. Daisy”—the film still falls short of expectations. The humor often seems forced, and Gondry’s overly simple script lacks the mature humor that made Eternal Sunshine a success.
Comedy, however, is not the focal point of this venture. As Gondry’s camera follows Mike and Jerry’s, it becomes clear that Gondry cares more about the nature of filmmaking and the role that a community can play in the process.
Set in a suburb of New York City, the film details how the tightly knit community rallies around a local VHS store in the era of DVDs. Gondry sets up a clear opposition between “Be Kind, Rewind” and “West Coast Video,” a chain store that deals in DVDs, implying a cultural shift to a less personal relationship between the individual and film. Be Kind seeks to challenge this notion by exhibiting the joys of becoming personally involved with filmmaking.
As the community becomes increasingly involved in the movie-making process, Mike and Jerry become stronger as filmmakers. While their special effects aren’t comparable to those of Hollywood’s blockbusters, they are equally creative and more entertaining. Be Kind, Rewind is not an incredible Hollywood film; the script is too simple and the directing seems borderline amateur. But maybe that’s Gondry’s point.
