‘The Addams Family’: An Amusing but Unremarkable Animated Adaptation

As the leaves change color throughout October, the perky melody of “The Addams Family” theme song and its contrasting sinister lyrics play as people get into the Halloween spirit. There’s no denying that The Addams Family is a household name — transcendent of the page and screen, the macabre clan has a perennial place in American pop culture. With this history in mind, any adaptation has a great deal to live up to. With an at-times clever script elevating a derivative plot, 2019’s animated adaptation of “The Addams Family” meets expectations by modernizing a classic story for the 21st century, creating a sufficiently amusing narrative that’s appealing to both children and parents alike.

“The Addams Family” follows Morticia (Charlize Theron) and Gomez Addams (Oscar Isaac) as they raise their children, Wednesday (Chloe Grace Mortez) and Pugsley (Finn Wolfhard), in suburban New Jersey. Tension ensues when the overly perky and performative realtor and reality show star Margaux Needler (Allison Janney) wants to renovate the Addams’ haunted mansion because it lowers the neighborhood’s property value. At the same time, the family must deal with the imminent arrival of their relatives for Pugsley’s coming of age “mazurka” celebration. The story does not particularly stand out among other animated children’s comedies, but the humor is accessible to both children and adults and sustains the hour and a half duration of the film.

Wednesday, a disenchanted adolescent preoccupied with morbid thoughts, begins a rebellious phase when she meets Parker (Elsie Fisher), the daughter of Margaux Needler. When Parker asks why she doesn’t have a cell phone, Wednesday deadpans, “I may not have a cell phone, but you don’t have a crossbow.” Parker and Wednesday become close friends, and realize that they both feel suffocated under the strict expectations their mothers impose upon them. Wednesday begins wearing more cheerful and feminine clothes, much to Morticia’s dismay — “Everyone knows pink is a gateway color," she chastises. Morticia and Wednesday’s clever and sarcastic one liners are frequent, making an average storyline more entertaining.

“The Addams Family," despite being a children’s movie, also critiques suburban conformity and conventionality. The development where antagonist Margaux Needler sells homes is called Assimilation, a not-so-subtle jab at the cookie-cutter lives of the typical American family. In one scene, the young girls of the town perform a song with the lyrics “Why be yourself when you can be like everyone else?” To further drive home the point, Margaux says, “It’s my calling to make everyone the same!” The unabashedly quirky Addams Family is starkly juxtaposed with the people of Assimilation, underscoring the rigid nature of societal expectations and conformity.

As the extended Addams family arrives in town and resists Margaux’s renovation plan, tension builds between the Addams and their fellow New Jersey suburbanites. Intolerant townspeople attempting to push out a nonconforming family is far from a new concept, but “The Addams Family” utilizes 21st century references to try to breathe life into an unoriginal plot. Throughout the movie, technology has an omnipresent role in the characters’ lives: The people of Assimilation keep tabs on one another with an invasive app called Neighborhood Peeps. Furthermore, when Margaux rallies the townspeople against the Addams family to demolish their home, they have images of torches on their smartphones, rather than holding physical ones — which perhaps makes subtle commentary on how technology and the Internet can help foster mob mentality.

Despite the social critiques, “The Addams Family” never really rises above ordinary. There are still frivolous action scenes, like the extended sequence documenting Pugsley’s adventures with explosives. As for the Addams’ extended family members, they are quirky but not necessarily likeable or humorous characters, making them feel like unnecessary additions that divert from the plot. Moreover, the overarching moral of the film is a lesson on tolerance, and it is laid on a bit too cloyingly by the final scene, which involves an implausibly fast resolution between the Addams and their antagonizers.

Taken as a whole, “The Addams Family” is an adequately diverting and at times witty, if ultimately forgettable, modern spin on the iconically macabre family that Americans have loved for decades.