None too bright, and none so brave
dir: Olivia Newman
2026
Just to avoid any confusion, or any amped up expectations, let me just admit outright that this is not a great flick. That’s right, the flick about octopuses probably ‘inspired’ by the success of covid-era documentary My Octopus Teacher is not a great flick.
It is cheesy. It is dorky. It is clumsy. It is obvious. It is so contrived that it deserves to be mocked. It is something that would have been ‘released’ on the Lifetime or Hallmark cable channels in the years gone by instead of Netflix.
And yet I still enjoyed it. I’m not going to say “I enjoyed it immensely”, but I laughed (very) occasionally, teared up a few times and did cry at the end, so that counts for something, hopefully, in this sometimes cold and brutal world(?)
Sally Field. She is probably one of the main reasons why I enjoyed the flick or at least had tender / forgiving feelings towards it. Who doesn’t love Sally Field? What kind of hollowed out husk of a jerk doesn’t adore this glorious woman?
I haven’t seen her in anything since the sweet Hello, My Name is Doris which surely was like a decade ago. But of course most people remember her as, I dunno, what do people remember her from the most? Playing Forrest’s momma in Forrest Gump? If you’re an Old, then you’d seen reruns of Gidget and The Flying Nun when you were a kiddlywink. Mrs Doubtfire? Not Without My Daughter? Soap? Aunt May in the Andrew Garfield Amazing Spider-Man movies? Mrs Lincoln in Lincoln?
If you’re a Young then you don’t know or care who Sally Field is and consider whole, entire movies to be a dead artform from the olden days, and you would rather watch 60 two minute TikToks or Reels in a row rather that one whole movie that goes for 2 hours.
And likely you don’t care about giant Pacific octopuses either, since by the time you read this they’ve probably gone extinct or something, and yes it was somehow your fault.
Even though usually constant voiceover drives me up the wall I did not in fact dislike the constant voiceover here. Mostly that’s because the voiceover is delivered by one of the greats, being Alfred Molina, with that amazing voice of his. Of course, famously he played the dastardly Dr Otto Octavius in a couple of Spider-Man movies, though not the ones Sally Field was in.
Even better here he is vocalising, entirely for our benefit, the thoughts of a giant Pacific octopus that the humans call Marcellus. I don’t know that he associates the name with himself, as in, I don’t know that he thinks of himself as a Marcellus, but that’s what they call him. Those thoughts are mostly of his loathing for humans.
It’s true, we’re a pretty loathsome bunch. We haven’t done wonders with the oceans, that’s for sure. And a number of humans, thinking they were helping him out, ‘rescued’ him and put him in an aquarium after he lost a limb to some vicious eel.
He don’t like eels, but then no-one should like eels. Mortal enemies to all mortals, let alone octopuses.
And Marcellus is quite mortal, though quite smart as well, to the point where he seems to understand human speech and can peer into people’s souls, able to perceive the wounds therein. He can even sneak out of his tank when no-one’s watching. And though he loathes humans in general and most of them specifically, for some reason he enjoys listening to one of them, being Tova (Sally Field) the cleaning lady complain about how much other people suck.
They both live in a small coastal town on Washington’s Pacific North West coast, though Tova doesn’t live at the aquarium; she has her own wooden house perched on a bay. She is elderly, but active. She doesn’t seem to like people, or at least has no patience with other people.
I’m sure there’s a reason for that.
A youngish guy called Cameron (Lewis Pullman) is driving an old van through that very same town and ends up breaking down. He happens to be looking for not just a father figure, but for his biological father, after the recent death of his junkie mother. He has very few clues as to his identity, but he also has a defective van.
He ends up working at the aquarium, and also boring the octopus with his petty and mundane concerns. I mean, Tova complains about the other people her age, but Cameron probably complains about… I dunno his orphan status and how all the local ladies can smell the loser on him.
As this is an intergenerational story, Tova’s purpose is to teach Cameron the merits of hard work and doing the best job possible whether it’s playing music to strangers or scrubbing chewing gum off of the floor, and Cameron’s purpose is… I dunno? He’s there maybe to get Tova to realise that young people have problems too, and that she’s a prisoner of the past. Also, he drives her around a bit, especially since she’s clumping around in a moonboot after a spill.
There’s a sadness in both of their lives, hers from losing her son back in the 90s, which haunts her more than the recentish death of her husband, and for Cameron it’s having been abandoned by his mother, having her recently die, and never having known his father. Despite being… I dunno, in his 30s or something, we’re meant to think he’s like an adolescent, bright, but unwilling or unable to do anything or commit to anything or anyone because of abandonment issues. He does have some woodworking skills, though, and meets cute with a local woman (Sofia Black-D’Elia) with whom he has nothing in common except that they are bipedal humanoids.
And yet, the heart yearns for what it’s told it can’t have. Neither Tova nor Cameron believe that they are worthy of love, or that it is worth the risk. Maybe some individual, some creature far wiser and farseeing than our pathetic human main characters will figure out a way through convenient plot devices to bring them together and show them that what they lack can be found in the other, and that they could be squished together like Lego pieces, and form a new family to make up for the families they lost?
And yes, I am totally taking the piss out of this set up, but I wasn’t completely unmoved by it. If anything I had more appreciation for Marcellus dour and salty take on the patheticness of humans and their inane, unceasing prattle, and the factoids about his existence than I did for the machinations of the humans day-to-day lives or explanations for their erratic behaviour. But then the makers knew this too. His is the spoonful of bitterness, the large shot of Angostura bitters that makes the treacle go down a little bit easier.
But I do forgive Sally Field anything and everything. Sure, she’s stubborn and annoying, but she acts the hell out of this role, and she makes it real and believable, regardless of how unlikely. An older grand dame of the silver screen playing someone torn between independence and just giving up and moving into a retirement village is all too believable, though not quite relatable (yet) for me, as I hopefully still have several decades before that’s an issue. Though I’ve seen it from the perspective of someone looking after an elderly parent, and this shit is all too hard and real.
Her coterie of old biddy friends don’t get much of a chance to shine, but the parts that stood out the most were that Beth Grant makes up one of her knitting group circle, the Knitwits, and she always makes an impression on me. Sure, it’s only because decades ago she delivered the classic line “Some times I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!” in Donnie Darko, but I’m generally always delighted when she shows up in things.
She also had one of my favourite deaths as the intro to an episode of Six Feet Under back in the day. If you’re old enough and recall from having watched that wonderfully demented show oh so long ago, many episodes began with like a short film depicting how a particular person ended up needing the particular skills available at the Fisher & Sons Funeral Home. Beth played a deeply religious woman who believed that the Rapture was happening, so that when a truckload of blow-up dolls accidentally ended up floating in the sky, her character thought the saved were being taken up into the sky naked by the Lord, and she ran out into traffic screaming “Praise Jebus!” as she got run the fuck over.
Of course she does some other great work in the episode, including a hot (deeply disturbing) sex scene / dream sequence with Nate Jr, but that still sticks in my head whenever I see her.
Her comical death, not the sex scene, you perverts.
She doesn’t do much of anything here, but it’s always great to see her. Just like most of these old biddies it’s hard for them to get work in this current environment, because, like a recent statistic showed, a film is four times more likely to have a talking animal as the lead character than a woman over 60, and six times more likely to have a lead actor whose name is Chris than be a woman over 60. Take that, terrible ageist patriarchal movie industry! You can’t handle the truth, or stats, or truth in statistical form! I am delighted to spend time with Sally Field, more so than her co-lead Lewis Pullman, who, let’s face it, is cursed as a nepo baby to be even blander in roles than his father Bill Pulman. But he does okay though, even if all the gathered actors are out-classed by a CGI octopus.
It’s an agreeable way to kill two hours you weren’t going to do anything useful with. And it does save its best joke for absolute last. I did have a laugh right at the end, glorious way to end things.
6 times we should all be more like Marcellus, in that we should have three hearts, squirt ink at our enemies and be molluscular invertebrates out of 10
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“I once knew every current, every path through the kelp. And the rush of endless freedom. There was a buffet of delicacies, all for my taking. But best of all, I could be alone. Oh, how I miss the peace and quiet of home.” - Remarkably Bright Creatures
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