Sundance ’07: Fido

*/****
starring Carrie-Anne Moss, Billy Connolly, Dylan Baker, Tim Blake Nelson
screenplay by Dennis Heaton, Robert Chomiak, Andrew Currie
directed by Andrew Currie

by Alex Jackson The first five or ten minutes of Fido are pretty terrific. Therein, an educational film depicts the "zombie wars," a time during the Forties in which space-dust turned our dead into zombies. The living won the ensuing conflict; and with the invention of the domestication collar by mega-corporation Zomcom, the zombies could be made to serve man. This movie-within-the-movie is in Academy ratio and grainy black-and-white, and when it finishes a grade-school teacher turns on the lights and the image expands to a 'scope tableau of a classroom glowing with bright candy colours. The film is a triumph of cinematography and set design–every detail feels just right. But then another ten minutes go by and we realize that all that is supporting the film is a thin one-joke premise. Fido seems to be a satire of 1950s suburbia, but what is it saying? Are the zombies supposed to be Communists (they are taken as the spoils of war and the film gets a lot of mileage out of Cold War paranoia)? Blacks in a system of pseudo-slavery in the segregation-era South (the zombies are all menial labourers)? Dogs (the titular Fido is a zombie our hero, young Timmy Robinson, befriends, setting the stage for a lot of cheap and easy "Lassie" jokes)? The three things appear to have something in common, but Fido doesn't quite connect the dots to offer one clear satirical perspective. The film also lacks much in the way of internal logic. For instance, the zombies are very bad at their jobs; they stumble and shuffle, are easily distracted, and have difficulty figuring out simple tasks. Why would the nation be so adamant about keeping them alive to work in jobs they can barely perform? And how does it enjoy the affluence of the 1950s if most blue-collar positions are filled by unpaid zombie labourers? A great deal of the humour comes from the juxtaposition of suburban bliss with a blithe acceptance of death: most of the kids have had to kill their zombefied parents and their recess is for target practice. The gag never moves towards making a statement about America's love affair with firearms and violence, though, instead staying on the superficial level of light absurdity. Fido isn't a bad film, exactly–it's just excruciatingly vapid.