An animated Robin Wright gets real in The Congress
Meta-Mation
By Tom Meek
Robin Wright takes on ageism in Hollywood in the animated film The Congress Folman, who held willing audiences rapt with his Oscar-nominated animated tale of an Israeli incursion into Beirut(2008), goes in an entirely different direction with this wide-ranging contemplation about individualism, control, ageism, and the dynamics of Hollywood.
“Different” is loosely how Folman described his goal with The Congress at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year, but in reality, the two films bare much in common. Both rely heavily on dream sequences and alter-realities to convey horror and meta themes, and both are animated in the same flat, textual style that is piquantly elegant, spare, and cartoonish all at once.
Folman’s latest takes its cue from the Stanislaw Lem novel The Futurological Congress and doesn’t really get to any of the plot elements or themes of the satirical 1971 future-scape until it transitions into an animated format about halfway in. The preamble before is a pat, but intriguing affair with the actress Robin Wright playing a fictionalized version of herself. The faux Robin lives a strange, yet cozy existence in a converted DC-9 hanger on the perimeter of an airport. Her son, Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee) for unexplained reasons enjoys flying a boxy red kite over the fence and into regulated airspace, which draws the ire of authorities not to mention two vicious German shepherds, an occurrence that bodes far heavier in the animated future world. Aaron too is ill and losing his hearing and sight, a condition that opens Wright up to a suggestion from her agent (a needling Harvey Keitel) to undertake the ultimate sellout: body, mind, and soul — screened into a computer so Hollywood can do with her as they like — even put her in a sci-fi movie, something the actress abhors.
Colin Firth gets a big scene-chewing role as Stanley Crawford, a 1920s illusionist who takes the stage as a Fu Manchu-like incarnation known as the Great Wei Ling Soo. He wows audiences, making elephants disappear and sawing women in half and, like Houdini did in his time, debunks hoaxes, which Stanley agrees to do when fellow magician Howard Burkan (Simon McBurney) asks him to come to a country villa in France to expose a young American woman shaking down a susceptible and well-off widow (Jackie Weaver). The young American woman in question, Sophie Baker, is played by none other than Emma Stone, a big-eyed cutie with auburn locks and by logistical association alone muse du jour to Allen. But she’s no Diane Keaton, not even a Mia Farrow or Mia Sorvino, for that matter. She’s game, but asked to do a lot with a little and beyond her range. Thankfully she has Firth to play off of, and he’s masterful. Initially when the game is afoot in the gorgeous greenery of Southern France, there’s promise and a playfulness in the air. The film suggests twist and turns to come, false reveals and oneupmanship, but then romance floats into the picture, and the notion of god too. What a buzzkill.
What to know: After losing his mother to cancer in the ’80s, Peter Quill (Chris Pratt of “Parks and Recreation”) is abducted by a spaceship. Flash forward a quarter-century to a galaxy far away in another universe, or something like that, and Quill is a treasure hunter seeking out high-risk items à la Indiana Jones, with the attitude to boot. Smugly he goes by the moniker Star-Lord as if he were Banksy, though no one knows who he is – that is, until he recovers an orb with some of the empowering infinity stones in it and everyone, including the evil Ronan (a cloaked and face-painted Lee Pace from “Halt and Catch Fire” ) and his overlord Thanos (voiced by Josh Brolin), want him and the orb. 
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For What it's Worth 