Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey
IFC Centre, October 25, 2011
Movie #75 for 2011
Kevin Clash (pictured, with Elmo) knew he wanted to be a puppetter from a very young age, so he cut up his dad’s furry coat to make his first Muppet-style puppet. And then he never looked back. He idolized Jim Henson and worked with him for many, many years, eventually taking over Sesame Street from him and creating the current - incredibly popular and incredibly lucrative - iteration of Elmo.
I liked the guy, I liked the subject matter, I liked the stories, and I very much enjoyed the behind-the-scenes look at creating the TV puppet illusion, but something about this doco failed to hit. It is a puff piece almost going out of its way to avoid conflict.
There are plenty of opportunities to discuss conflict - Clash is a very poor kid from suburban Baltimore with a strange and fiercely observed hobby, which marks him as an outsider. He follows his dream and works myopically hard to the seeming exclusion of all else, including eventually his wife and daughter. He ends up in television where, Jim Henson’s magical work environment aside, there are egos and meddling executives and the inherent conflict of art versus ratings. Then there is Elmo's gruelling international tour schedule where Clash does every single performance himself. There are clearly voices that aren’t heard that might be critical of Clash. But the doco seems uninterested, or unwilling to give a more rounded view. It’s a puff piece.
Another noticeably absent element of the film was context. I know that this is a profile piece of one guy, but very little time is spent painting a picture about what it was like to work in Jim Henson’s workshop or with him. And why did there seem to be movie cameras following the 17 year-old Clash around as he met with Kermit, a puppet designer for Sesame Street? There’s a bunch of professionally shot archival footage from the 1970s following Clash around at meetings and as he creates characters - I would have loved to know why.
As a film, it’s as sweet and charming as Elmo, but, like Elmo, is fairly shallow.
