Annie

Annie

The new “Annie” is getting kicked around the block like a red-headed stepchild, but if you see it with a big audience you’ll feel something quite different from what some critics have described: unrestrained delight.

This is the first new version of the Broadway musical since the 1999 ABC TV edition, and the only major motion picture version since John Huston’s 1982 film adaptation starring Aileen Quinn, Albert Finney and Carol Burnett. (The ’99 TV version is great, by the way definitely worth tracking down; it’s easily the best thing director Rob Marshall has ever been associated with.)

This current “Annie” is worse than its predecessors in terms of production values and direction alone; Will Gluck (TV’s “The Marshalls” and “Andy Richter Controls the Universe”) has imagined it as a container for 2014 music and musical performance clichés, with unattractively composed widescreen vistas onto which actors are popped and made to cavort, while singing voices that have been Auto-Tuned within an inch of their lives come out of their mouths.

And yet a quality of willfully naive optimism goodness that keeps getting ignored or disappointed in itself but keeps rising up off the pavement anyway, summoning a smile, singing out shines through all this anyhow, and cancels out many of the movie’s other deficiencies. Bottom line: this “Annie” is a big smiley face arriving on screens at the end of one of our unhappiest years a year whose unending river of bad news challenged not just our identity as an America but also our belief that good things happen to good people; even those lucky enough to be born American into relatively prosperous times. Let alone those who weren’t.

And now here is Quvenzhané Wallis, history’s youngest Oscar nominee, stepping into shoes previously filled only by red-haired Caucasian girls, walking through a present day New York City enclosed and partly superseded by the virtual world of cell phones and the Internet and satellite locators, singing and dancing opposite an African-American version of Daddy Warbucks, a self-made cell phone magnate played by Jamie Foxx and it’s still “Annie,” a quintessentially American story about remaking oneself and reaching for new horizons.

This Annie is a foster child living in an apartment with other foster children rather than an “orphan” as described in other versions. And she’s been situated within a universe that’s contemporary but also connects powerfully to the Depression-era landscapes of the stage musical, the ’99 and ’82 films, the Harold Gray comic strip that inspired them all; all were about keeping one’s chin up despite personal misfortune punctuated by Grand Canyon wide gaps between rich and poor; all were about not losing touch with one’s feelings or common sense in a dog eat dog world where everyone but the very wealthy had to fight tooth and nail for everything, deny themselves some things they wanted or needed.

This is also the story of a heroine blessed or cursed with a particular kind of optimism: Annie’s signature ballad “Tomorrow” is not sung by an ignorant or stupid or naive child who doesn’t know any better, but one who knows damn well how bad things can get and how unfair life can be sometimes yet refuses to let her shoulders sag no matter what people say around her even adults because she intends to keep dreaming (and working) for her dreams until they come true.

Wallis is the foremost Annie who brings something culturally, and personally innovative to this character; the movie acknowledges it as well: it sets up her entry by having another Annie open the movie in a classroom scene where she schools her teacher and classmates with a lesson set to music with a bubble gum R&B back beat (Wallis takes over as a different Annie who happens to have the same name). Wallis wins our hearts with pure charisma she absolutely dominates the film.

But here’s the really lovely part, which is also true of Foxx’s performance as Stacks, essentially Michael Bloomberg wrapped in antibacterial hand wash who shrinks from human contact and pulls out Purell every time he shakes someone’s hand: It’s not about knocking any previous “Annie.” Instead, it says something closer to this: “Hey, we changed the color of the leads. We made modern music for them to sing. We filtered all complications and revelations through new technology in our re-jiggered story. But still, we’re telling you that old story. It has those themes.”

The film understands sharply how much needs to be re-thought and reconfigured when it comes to public life on stage or screen in 2014 (“Annie” seems especially emblematic of this problem), given things like YouTube videos of cops pushing around peaceful protesters; surveillance cameras catching high-ranking officials pocketing bribes; or satellite tracking heat signatures for drone strikes thousands of miles away.

At one point early on, Stacks’ bid for mayor ship is DOA because his extreme queasiness about human contact makes him so unlikable; but then a cell phone video of him saving Annie from getting run over goes viral (the adviser’s attempt to recreate this random event for political gain has a Preston Sturges feeling), and all kinds of people start singing his praises again. The movie knowingly winks at the audience that all these new gadgets are making experience more theoretical than physical like the “starry sky” on the wall of Annie’s bedroom at Stack’s, which is actually a series of video screens but it also reaffirms that no matter how real or unreal the world may seem to be getting, love and lack thereof are real things that can save us or tear us apart.

If you consider that a project may easily have fallen apart under its own weight of self-imposed imperatives, then the film’s relaxed attitude is all the more impressive. “Annie” is light on its feet, bubbly and always aggressively at times perversely kind; it wants to melt sour hearts like marshmallows.

Wallis is impossible not to like; she plays Annie as a smart, tough kid without a mean bone in her body, and when her pluck finally crumples under yet another disappointment, your heart falls with hers. The supporting cast is equally good company. Among the standouts are Foxx, a handsome leading man whose acting convinces us that Stacks might actually be terrified of the world and his own heart; Rose Byrne as Grace, Stack’s right hand woman and living-breathing conscience (not to mention unrequited love object); David Zayas as Lou, a bodega owner who is nice to Annie and has a crush on her harridan foster mom; and Bobby Cannavale as Guy, Stacks’s campaign advisor (the only truly rotten character in the movie, which means he steals every scene he’s in).

The cast’s one weak link is Cameron Diaz as cynical, cunning foster mom/system-gamer Miss Hannigan, once an R&B wannabe. (The movie soundtrack has an urban contemporary coat of shellac; there are pretty good new songs by compeer-producers Sia and Greg Kurstin.)

Diaz is a trouper who will try anything once; her big “Easy Street” number with Cannavale is enjoyable even though the director inexplicably hacks it into ribbons with unnecessary cross-cutting. But she lacks the exuberant vulgarity and vampy delight that every other Hannigan has brought to the part. She’s not slinky enough or desperate enough too wounded too early which means we can’t be surprised when Hannigan reveals hidden good qualities.

This “Annie” will not win any awards for subtlety, let alone filmmaking grace. But it is very imaginative and has a lot of heart. That would be easier to see if the movie were more of a self-regarding art house showpiece and less of a cotton candy multiplex confection. But what does it matter, really, when you’ve got Wallis deadpanning her way through a city made entirely out of sugar?

This “Annie” is so very welcome right now. Its easygoing, multi-ethnic can’t we all just get along is a pop culture Band-Aid for a country with a bruised sense of possibility. On purely aesthetic grounds, it’s a two and a half star movie at best. The extra half star is for sending people out of the theater wanting to hug somebody and get hugged back, then face whatever day comes next.

Watch Annie For Free On Gomovies.