Final Rating: 3/5
In Sylvain Chomet’s A Magnificent Life, he has the easy task of making Marcel Pagnol’s life out to be extraordinary. It wouldn’t take much effort to comb through a biography on Pagnol and, for many of us, feel like we haven’t made much of ourselves by comparison. Through Chomet’s talent as a director, he crafts the story in a way that doesn’t look down its nose at the audience, but looks up at the life Pagnol led.
Marcel Pagnol, whose adult form is voiced by Matthew Gravelle in the English dub, lived a wild and diverse life. He was a prominent French writer who dabbled in plays and cinema to great success. He created his own film studio in the 1930s and produced a large number of films. And at the end of his career, he started writing autobiographies, which is about when A Magnificent Life picks up its story.
A courier arrives to collect the first chapter of Marcel’s memoir. However, Marcel hasn’t yet put pen to paper for a single letter. He reasons that the courier will require at least three hours to repair one of his wobbly bike wheels and decides the last minute is the best time to get anything done.
Chomet takes us on a journey back through Marcel’s life using Marcel’s failing memory as a plot device. His childhood self enters the frame and helps Marcel remember what life was like when he was younger, transporting everyone back to that time as he hastily writes his memoir in the film’s present. His past is riddled with simplicities. After all, who could tell a story about their childhood and adulthood in its entirety in a mere ninety minutes? Many things are necessarily abbreviated and condensed, but unfortunately contrived in equal measure.
For a while, the film seems so reverent of Pagnol, that it worships the very ground he walked on–ground that spanned the entirety of France from Marseille to Paris. He faced hardships, but the film glosses over them to a certain extent.
A Magnificent Life truly finds its lane when Pagnol enters the business of penning screenplays. Each frame of the film becomes so much more vibrant and alive that it would not be surprising to learn that Chomet’s desire to make this film in the first place stemmed from him wanting to create some of these highly technical and ingenious sequences.
There are multiple scenes where animated characters in an animated movie theater watch clips from Pagnol’s films play out on a live action screen. The meticulous nature of combining the two mediums is exquisite and flawless. Perhaps more thrilling is a scene when Marcel describes the way he wants to film one of his movies and Chomet’s “camera” mimics the techniques Marcel is describing. It’s hard to not be impressed by this fluid sequence that shows true love for the craft of moviemaking.
The opening scene and latter half of the film shine brightest. The dialogue becomes crisper; the commentary on the film industry and beyond is more potent. Similar to Marcel, the film feels more comfortable, like it finally found its home.
Ultimately, A Magnificent Life comes across as a passionate and personal love letter from Chomet. It’s not as story-rich as his Oscar-nominated The Triplets of Belleville, but it’s clear how invested Chomet was in making this movie. And to that end, it’s also understandable that the story at the heart of A Magnificent Life is a series of bullet points from Marcel Pagnol’s life and career that don’t fully coalesce into something bigger.
Thank you to Mongrel Media and Star PR for the screener.
