THE INVENTOR - Mark Reviews Movies

The Inventor, Curiosity Studio

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | September 14, 2023

A strange movie that doesn't seem to know what audience it wants to reach, The Inventor tries to be for both kids and adults, but the filmmakers clearly don't know how to juggle the conflicting attempts to appeal to those distinct crowds. It's a movie about the later years of Leonardo da Vinci, made by way of stop-motion puppetry and hand-drawn animation, so it has the aesthetic of some child-friendly project. The story, though, also revolves around politics, grave robbing and human dissection, and Leonardo's fear that death will rob him of his sole opportunity to uncover the secrets of life—you know, the stuff that really excites the kids.

Basically, this is a movie at war with itself, leaving us feeling defeated. The central appeal of the narrative is for those with an interest in the life and scientific/philosophical concerns of one of history's great minds. The movie's look and tone, though, aim much lower, with cutesy puppets and colorful drawings going through flights of fancy and some shenanigans in between thin discussions about war, city planning, and our protagonist's existential crisis. There are musical numbers, too, featuring songs that mostly continue those conversations, making them as lyrically convoluted as they are musically forgettable.

What was the thinking, really, of writer/director Jim Capobianco? The filmmaker's debut feature arrives after a lengthy career in animation, but apart from the fact that it looks decent with what must have been a lower budget than other projects on which he worked, the whole thing seems defined by a sense of uncertainty. The movie wants to be thoughtful, and it wants to be fun. In trying to force both of them together in so many incongruent ways, this fanciful but inherently dark biography turns out to possess neither of those qualities.

The story takes place in the 1510s, as Leonardo (voice of Stephen Fry, who's theoretically a great bit of vocal casting, if the actual performances were in service of characters with some personality) lives and works in Rome. His current interests are vast and varied, although he's looking to the heavens with a giant magnifying glass and secretly dissecting cadavers in his workshop to uncover the workings of the human body. Both of those, especially the latter, could and do put him into conflict with Pope Leo X (voice of Matt Berry), who wants Leonardo to design weapons of war against the French or to make divine art like his contemporary Michelangelo, who's currently working on a soon-to-be famous ceiling.

Anyway, Leonardo helps to negotiate a peace between the Vatican and King Francis I (voice of Gauthier Battoue) of France. When it becomes clear that the Pope could have him imprisoned or worse for his human studies, Leonardo accepts an invitation to the French royal court, to serve as one of an admiring Francis' chief advisors.

The resulting plot has Leonardo torn between three objectives. The first is the new expectation of his loyalty to Francis, who quickly reveals himself to be a narcissist, wanting to compete in terms of stature with other European monarchs, and under the thumb of his mother (voiced by Marion Cotillard). The second comes from the King's younger sister Marguerite (voice of Daisy Ridley), who wants Leonardo to design the ideal city—a goal the great thinker gradually comes to admire.

Finally, of course, there's his own desire to unlock the secrets of the body and, from there, the location of the soul, as well as some notion of a design to human existence. Capobianco, with co-director Pierre-Luc Granjon, visualizes Leonardo's experiments in autopsy figuratively, at least, as sketches of hallways and other designs represent the scientist's work. That doesn't keep the whole thing from being questionable within the context of the movie's attempts at a lighter tone, especially with a couple of dim gravediggers becoming confounded by disappearing bodies and one awkward comedic bit that has Leonardo's two assistants trying to convince the King that a rotting corpse is just a sick man.

Clearly, Capobianco has some knowledge of and passion about the subject at hand, given the specific period of Leonardo's life that's covered here and the very fact that the filmmaker would bother to create something like it in this medium and with this tonal approach. It may seem unfair to simply say that the method of telling the story of The Inventor, with its serious subject matter and thematic musings playing out within the confines of a something so decidedly aimed at younger audiences, is wholly misguided. Fair and overly simplified or not, it's just true, though.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products