Vivo (2021)

Film: Vivo (2021)

Stars: Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ynairaly Simo, Zoe Saldana, Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, Brian Tyree Henry, Nicole Byer, Gloria Estefan

Director: Kirk DeMicco

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

We're finishing off our week looking at 2021 films, many of them Oscar contenders, with an unexpected movie.  After all, if you're thinking about a 2021 animated musical featuring the songs of Lin-Manuel Miranda, you'd assume that I'd be discussing Encanto, a film that seems destined to be nominated for (and perhaps even win) Best Animated Feature next year at the Oscars.  But I'm going to subvert expectations (mostly because last Saturday I wanted something mindless & that I could just sort of process rather than think super hard about late in the evening...I'm not a night person) by reviewing the forgotten Miranda musical of 2021, Vivo.  Yes, even the most devoted of film fans might have forgotten about Vivo, which came-and-went without so much as a bump on the Film Twitter scale, and I was curious as to why.  After all, while Miranda has become something of a pop culture punching bag in the past year, and his output strategy (he's had four major studio releases this year, all with musical quotient, risking a serious amount of "too much" from the public) is questionable, he's still a bonafide celebrity & one of the most important musical voices in the country.  I was curious as to why Vivo seemed to slip onto Netflix without anyone really noticing.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Vivo (Miranda), a singer-musician monkey (excuse me, kinkajou, as we learn later in the picture), who performs on the streets of Havana with his best friend Andres (Gonzalez).  Andres learns that his long-lost love Marta (Estefan), who is now a legendary singer but whom he knew before she was famous, is giving her farewell performance and has invited him to attend.  He wants to go to confess his love for her, but Vivo refuses and runs away.  When he returns, he finds that Andres has died, and after accidentally stowing away with his great-niece Gabi (Simo), an atypical girl who enjoys drumming (a pastime she shared with her now-deceased father), the two form a bond to wander through the Everglades & get to Marta's last concert to share a song that Andres wrote for her, confessing his love.

I honestly don't really need a spoiler alert to let you know that they get there, even if they have to face a burmese python, some Type-A girl scouts, and Gabi's frazzled single mother along the way.  Vivo might have disappeared not because it's a bad movie (it's not, really, though I'm going with 2-stars for reasons I'm about to get into) but because it's a boring one.  There's nothing distinctive here-the story goes on the same beats.  We're expected to assume that Gabi has no friends because she's atypical, but she's a sweet, gregarious girl who might not be friends with the girls that are presented in this picture, but surely would have sought out a similarly-minded pal by now (even if everyone in the film seems frightened by her dyed purple hair).  This is the sort of lazy writing you get from an animated film 15 years ago & it felt cliche then-in 2021, I expect something more.

I honestly expect more from Lin-Manuel Miranda as well.  The music should be the calling card here-his tunes were such a beautiful fit for Moana, and of course In the Heights and Hamilton both dominated the Tony Awards for a reason.  But here most of the soundtrack feels phoned-in, trading off of past glory.  Again, it's not bad (I liked the way that Estefan, the film's best singer, performed the heartfelt "Inside Your Heart" in the film's penultimate number), but it's also not special.  As Miranda continues to make his mark in film (and we anxiously await his inevitable Hamilton followup onstage), I do hope that Vivo isn't an indication that he's spreading himself too thin.