MOVIE REVIEW : Magical Flights of Fancy Decorate the Proceedings Under ‘Big Top’

There’s a farm in “Big Top Pee-wee” (citywide) that’s just what a kindergartner might dream a farm should be: clean, bright and as much like home as possible.

In a barn where brown cows give chocolate milk, the animals sleep on mattresses in their stalls, make their own beds and eat a flapjack breakfast together around a picnic table. In the garden, after a tug-of-war over a row of carrots, we get the gopher’s-eye view of the battle as well as Farmer Pee-wee’s.

When flights of fancy like this work, and they do for about half of this newest Pee-wee Herman adventure, you have a world seductive enough to snare adults right alongside their kids. With his co-writer George McGrath and director Randal Kleiser, Paul Reubens (Pee-wee’s alter ego) has kept the magic going far longer than you might have believed possible.

Part of it comes from props, effects, sumptuous photography and cooler-than-cool production design. This perfect world, a patchwork quilt of a farm, a tidy Midwestern small town, has been detailed down to the last, lovely bit of inventiveness. If Pee-wee must put his hand on a glowing hand-print identification plate to get into his secret laboratory, you can be sure Vance, his talking pet pig, must match snout prints as well.

The rest of the fun comes from Reubens and McGrath’s script and from the well-practiced performance of Reubens and, especially, Kris Kristofferson as Mace Montana, unflappable head of the Circus Cabrini that, literally, blows into Pee-wee’s back 40.

In a story that pits the smart, smart-alecky Pee-wee, walking symbol of irrepressible childhood, against an entire town of gray, dried-up old people (i.e. grown-ups), Mace Montana becomes the dry, funny buffer. Kristofferson puts a lovely spin on moments like the one after a circus wagon falls on him. He suspects he’s got a few busted ribs, probably internal injuries but, he says, “I’m circus,” and simply gets on with things. There is also a funny, if unresolved, running joke about Mace’s wife, Midge (Susan Tyrrell)--you do not want to think too much about their private life.

This is also the movie in which Pee-wee, engaged to Winnie, the local schoolmarm (Penelope Ann Miller), falls for the visiting trapeze artist (Valeria Golino) in a manner both graphic and satiric. Although this assault on fidelity may bewilder the very young, Winnie’s hysterical spriteliness at being free, free, free is almost worth the moral confusion.

Do you have to like Pee-wee’s quintessential brattiness to savor the movie? Probably not; he may sneak up on you anyway in a rapid-fire of sight gags and droll lines, half of them throwaway. (The movie is a gorgeous sight, with particularly deep bows to production designer Stephen Marsh, cinematographer Steven Poster, editor Jeff Gourson, the visual effects produced by Richard Edlund, Robert Turturice’s extravagant costuming and Danny Elfman’s music.)

When the circus takes over center stage--replete with every possible performer from 33-inch Michu (“smallest man in the world”) to a dog-faced boy, who mostly barks--a jolt of old-fashioned, “Toby Tyler at the Circus” excitement comes too. Then, almost imperceptibly, the movie becomes mired in plot and the fun winds down. The writers don’t investigate the circus milieu with the unflagging inventiveness they tackled the farm setting. You find yourself willing the material to charm you as much as it did in the opening. The grand finale very nearly does just that: A circus extravaganza sweetly built around the theme of an American Farm (marching ears of corn, tightrope-walking cows.) Then, Reubens pulls the plug. It’s over before it’s concluded, as if every bit of invention had gone into the first half with nothing in reserve at the close. It’s a detail that may not matter a whit to Pee-wee’s young Saturday morning crowd, so who are we to complain? Grown-ups. And we know what Pee-wee thinks of them.

‘BIG TOP PEE-WEE’

A Paramount Pictures presentation of a Paul Reubens production. Producers Paul Reubens, Debra Hill. Executive producers William E. McEuen, Richard Gilbert Abramson. Director Randal Kleiser. Screenplay Reubens, George McGrath. Production design Stephen Marsh. Camera Steven Poster. Editor Jeff Gourson. Music Danny Elfman. Visual effects produced by Richard Edlund. Costumes Robert Turturice. Art director Beala B. Neel.Set decorator Anne D. McCulley. Set designers Stephen Homsy, William J. Newmon II, Richard W. Pitman, Carl Aldana. With Pee-wee Herman, Kris Kristofferson, Penelope Ann Miller, Valeria Golino, Susan Tyrrell, Kenneth Tobey, Anne Seymour, Frances Bay, Mary Jackson.

Running time: 1 hour, 27 minutes.

MPAA-rated: PG (parental guidance suggested).