On DVD: Cloudy With a Chance of Big, Fat, Scathing Satire

This week Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs emerges, like a flood of curdled cream from a giant mutant eclair, onto DVD, and you shouldn't, if you skipped it, dismiss it as just another digital kids' cartoon, the kind that usually features penguins or cows and has Patrick Warburton voicing a dim-witted lug character of some type (not that there's anything wrong with Patrick Warburton or his voicing skills), and blah blah blah. It's not Pixar, but its not Happy Feet, either. It is in fact a scalding, stomach-churning, essentially Swiftian mockery of Americans, American privilege, and American gluttony. It could not have been made in any other country in the world.

I say Swiftian thinking of not of Gulliver's Travels so much as A Modest Proposal, in which, you'll remember, Swift ripped Great Britain's feast-and-famine inequities by advocating the selling of children to be eaten by the rich. You can't unload an elephant gun like that anymore unless you disguise it as a lovable kids' film, which WALL-E did a few years back, lacerating modern American consumerism with such shoot-the-wounded elan I was astonished when audiences seemed altogether unchastened. The same happened for Cloudy, which uses Judi and Ron Barrett's lovely, unsatirical little children's book to uncork a firehose of stomach acid upon the ways we eat, overeat, demand convenience, and generally revel greedily in our own excesses. It was a hit, but afterwards we as a people didn't seem to be losing any of our extraordinary bloat. In Swift's day as in ours, satires can be seen merely as entertainment, and there's no underestimating the American reflex to take a valid point but decide that it doesn't exactly pertain to oneself, even as one polishes off the barrel of coconut-oil-saturated popcorn in one's lap.

Ah, well. Cloudy is actually a perfectly adroit and wittily designed farce; James Caan, Andy Samberg and Mr. T all score big in conjunction with their characters' outrageously drawn physicalities, and the obligatory blundering-hero-finds-redemption screenplay is almost inspired in its details. But the crux of the story remains thus: A small town's weather begins dropping food out of the sky, pancakes and hamburgers and mashed potatoes by the metric ton. First it's a delicious blessing, but soon the inundation becomes apocalyptic, and the food itself has cause to come supersized in monstrous portions. If it were a live-action film, it'd be nauseating to the point of being unwatchable: fetid, ripe mountains of peanut-butter sandwiches; bulldozed landfills of ice cream; steaks as big as swimming pools crushing houses.

As it is, the food-drunk denizens of this all-American burg eat until they're insane -- we're witnesses to scene after scene of characters (except for Bill Hader's cartoon-stick hero) distending their cartoon jaws and gulping down five-foot hot dogs, and so on. It's a family film tthat would've had Luis Buñuel howling with glee. But the rest of us? How could you not watch this Nero-esque carnage and not walk away swearing off food -- or at best, settling for a small salad? With just a spritz of vinaigrette, thanks?

Most Americans walked away with a bellyful of popcorn, soda and a 34-ounce KitKat in their bellies, of course. One supposes the function of satire cannot be to literally affect society -- starvation continued in Ireland after Swift, TV just got worse after Network, etc. All satire can hope to do is just make a small portion of us hyperaware of how awful things are, and make us thankful that somebody took a steel-tipped whip to it all. I'm not a skinny man, by any means. But Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs made me sick.