|
Released in 1987 (review written January 1, 2024)
Rating: 10/10 It's the New Year, 2024, and I am still alive! My celebration for New Year's Eve involved mom's scalloped potatoes and a mixed cherry/grape juice with lemon lime Stevia soda -- and then we watched Return to Oz, my favorite film of all time. Nothing tops it. Every time I see Dorothy gaze longingly into the mirror, or stare out her bedroom window at the vast desolation of Kansas while that violin plays the theme, I get tears in my eyes. It's hard not to weep when she is being taken to the "electric healing" center and Toto runs after her, howling. 
The film follows a cycle of sorts where Dorothy escapes from the scary nurse at the clinic, then later uses the Gump to fly away from Mombi. She ultimately ends up at the gnome king's mountain to confront the misplaced authority of a delusional, tyrannical man. It's vaguely anti-psychiatry. I mean, can't we all agree that electric shock treatments are insane abuses of power, though? No one pines for the days of overdosing patients with insulin so they fall into a coma, or cold water hoses that practically drown them (and send them into hypothermia), or frontal lobotomies. I know there are electric "techniques" that aren't painful in the slightest but I would never, no matter how depressed or psychotic I am, sign off on such a treatment because it involves some degree of damage to the brain. Messing with electric signals without knowing precisely, and I mean precisely, what they do is madness and medical butchery.  The movie does evoke feelings in me from when I've been hospitalized, when I lived in a group home. But it's too cozy, and the friends Dorothy meets along the way like Tik-Tok, Jack, and the Gump take me further back to childhood. The world is too fantastical and imaginary to relegate to those hazy, dark years of adolescence. To me, there is actually a mystical quality to the film. It is more than the sum of its parts. Very few movies manage to accomplish such a task. Another one that comes to mind is the first Neverending Story movie. Both Return to Oz and Neverending Story are dark movies. No, that's not a reference to their lighting (in fact, Return to Oz is quite brightly lit aside from Dorothy's escape from the clinic). It's their nature and content.  Psychiatric treatment against her will, the deadly desert turning you into sand, the ruins of Oz, the wheelers (oh god the wheelers), Mombi's heads (especially the scene where Dorothy is stealing the key for the life powder), the Gump falling apart, the gnome king disintegrating from a chicken egg... all of these are really dark, scary scenes. I was 4 or 5 when I saw them and I'm not sure that was a good thing. I saw lots of weird stuff as a kid because my parents were a little ignorant about ratings. If a movie was Not Rated, or Unrated, they thought it was acceptable for young children. Can you imagine how that went? So Return to Oz was on par with most movies I was seeing back then. Perhaps that makes it fine.  It's the contrast between the light and dark that make it so mystical to me, and the emotions beautiful Fairuza Balk managed to convey in her tender young acting. It's the movie score, that sountrack with that sickly sweet violin. It's the matte paintings and cold landscapes, and the eerie ruins of Oz (that always made me think of the garden departments at Home Depot). It's that room with all the ornaments. It felt so special, so magnificent, buried deep under a mountain, and it housed all kinds of spectacular knick-knacks. There was a bust of some Roman Emperor I think. As a kid, I marvelled at it and wondered if each ornament was actually a person the gnome king had transformed. The room was also brightly lit for so dark a place, and reminded me of the chandeliers and ceiling fan/lights section of Home Depot too. Going to Home Depot used to be such a magical thing, as you might have guessed. It was like stepping into Oz for me.  That's enough bloviating from me. The movie is perfection. There isn't a single thing that should be improved. It was made exactly the way it needed to be made and there aren't many things in this world that you can say that about. Many of my favorite things could have something tweaked here or there, but for me, Return to Oz is a flawless masterpiece. I'll leave this review absolutely recommending it for children and adults alike. Mom and I always watched it, and strangely enough, I have good memories of my sister liking it too! She left home early in high school and only came to visit a few times a year, and she really liked Mombi and her heads a lot. She has a daughter and son now who I've barely met, and some day I'd like to watch Return to Oz with them, my niece and nephew, too.  Or I'll travel back in time to 1997, 98, or 99. I'm not sure yet. I don't feel at home in this world, in the year 2024, in my body. I'm in my childhood home still, but it doesn't feel like home. It's so far away and different. And that's what motivates me to go back, to don my ruby slippers and click my heels three times. There's no place like home, indeed... |
