By Susan Granger
To paraphrase a popular axiom: The road to oblivion is paved with good intentions.
Sally Field, Lewis Pullman and a rust-colored giant Pacific octopus team up for “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” a tedious tale of loss, loneliness and love.
Set in the quaint, picturesque, seaside town of Sowell Bay in the state of Washington, it revolves around Tova (Field), a widowed cleaning lady at the local aquarium, and a stranded rock musician, Cameron (Pullman), who are befriended by perceptive Marcellus (voiced by Alfred Molina), a captive cephalopod.
(These eight-tentacled mollusks have gained popularity and cinematic recognition since the 2020 Oscar-winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher.”)
When Cameron’s beat-up minivan breaks down, he needs temporary work to pay for the vehicle’s repair and, conveniently, that coincides with Tova’s nursing an ankle injury, so she painstakingly teaches him the ‘proper’ way to do her job.
Confiding in one another, still-grieving Tova tells Cameron about how her teenage son was lost in Puget Sound, and Cameron tells Tova how the death of his drug-addicted mother sent him searching for his birth father, about whom he knows very little.
As the murky, implausible melodrama unfolds, elderly, empathetic CG-created Marcellus listens, planning his next ‘escape’ from the noise surrounding his tank, noting, “There’s no quiet like the bottom of the sea,” and complaining, “I am subservient to a species beneath me in every observable metric.”
Eventually, however. Marcellus concludes: “Humans, you know, usually you are dull and blundering, but occasionally you can be remarkably bright creatures.”
Based on Shelby Van Pelt’s popular novel, directed and co-written with John Whittington by Olivia Newman (“Where the Crawdads Sing”), it’s predictable from start to finish, wasting the talents of Tova’s BFFs (Joan Chen, Kathy Baker and Beth Grant) – known as the Knitwits because they enjoy knitting – along with Colm Meaney as a genial shopkeeper and Sofia Black-D’Elia as the owner of a paddleboard store.
On the Granger Gauge of 1 to 10, “Remarkably Bright Creatures” is a sluggish, silly, sappy 6, streaming on Netflix.
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