Remarkably Bright Creatures
⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️
Rating: PG-13
Run Time: 1 hour 51 minutes
Stars: Sally Field, Lewis Pullman, Alfred Molina
Writers: Olivia Newman, John Whittington, Shelby Van Pelt (novel)
Director: Olivia Newman
Streaming on Netflix
An earnest, fragile sense of tenderness infuses this dreamlike tale of a lonely woman, an aimless young man, and an imprisoned octopus – whose three lives intersect in unexpected, borderline miraculous ways.
Tova (Sally Field) is a haunted widow, working nights as the cleaning woman at a Pacific Northwest aquarium. She has a cadre of faithful human friends (Joan Chen, Kathy Baker, and Beth Grant) and an admiring would-be suitor (Colm Meaney) – but her deepest relationship seems to be with Marcellus, an aging octopus to whom she confides her most private thoughts while wiping down his tank each night.
Murmuring memories and regrets, Tova gazes into Marcellus’s soulful eyes, presses her hands against the thick glass, and occasionally opens the top of his tank to feel his tentacles wrap around her forearms.
Lest we fear this might be heading into a kinky Shape of Water-like fantasy, though, it’s clear that Tova feels her one-way conversations with Marcellus are primarily a form of therapy. Little does she suspect that octopuses, in fact, possess a level of intelligence beyond that of mere humans: Marcellus not only understands every word Tova says, he is trying to find a way to help his friend emerge from her emotional funk.
We know this because Marcellus is the story’s narrator, given voice by the endlessly emotive Alfred Molina (who, we can only assume coincidentally, played the eight-armed villain Doc Ock in the Spider-Man films).
Into Tova’s life stumbles Cameron (Lewis Pullman, who every day looks and sounds more like his father, Bill), a 30-ish, charming-but-distracted loser who has arrived in town in a beat-up microbus. Muttering something about collecting a bunch of money from the father he never knew, Cameron takes a temporary job filling in for Tova, who has sprained her ankle in an octopus-related office accident.
Like Tova, Cameron finds himself confiding in the ever-attentive Marcellus, who discerns that the tragedies in both of their lives are, by a coincidence extreme even in a universe of genius octopuses, intimately linked.
The problem: How can a mute octopus convey a such a staggeringly complex notion? Multiplying the dilemma: While octopuses have eight legs, they don’t have nine lives, and Marcellus can sense his time is nearing its end.
Much credit goes to director/co-writer Olivia Newman (Where the Crawdads Sing) for sustaining an of-course-this-could-really-happen vibe throughout. She is aided greatly by a cast that employs sheer likeability to push the increasingly improbable story forward. Field’s perpetual perkiness renders Tova’s episodes of sadness that much more heartbreaking. Pullman is a master of the incredulous head-toss; the pleasingly bemused smirk. As the Irish-born local grocer, Meaney embodies big-hearted small-town compassion. And Molina proves that the most effective movie voice work isn’t always in a Pixar cartoon.
The movie’s CGI octopus, by the way, is a wonder to behold. If anything, the movie could use more of it – a criticism I’ve seen echoed in reviews of Shelby Van Pelt’s novel of the same name. At times the critter disappears from the narrative for such long periods you come to realize the entire storyline – including the final discovery – could easily have been accomplished without any octopus at all.
Still, as the script points out, an octopus has not one heart, but three. And that’s just about enough to go around in this uncommonly heartfelt drama.
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