Theatre at the Museum

French poet and statesman Alphonse de Lamartine once claimed that “Museums are the cemeteries of the arts”. But  2006 family film Night at the Museum (NATM) depicts a rather livelier museum, in which the dead spring back to life as holograms, and the old and dusty are never quite what they seem.

Mixing live-action and CGI, NATM gets over some of the basics of ancient history in an entertaining, family-friendly kinda way. At its surface the film works as an emotive father & son tale. 

 

Ben Stiller plays Larry Daley, an unsettled and unemployed divorcee. His unreliability sees him tossed out of apartments all over New York City – hardly a good role model for his young son Nick (Jake Cherry).

 

Afraid of losing Nick’s affections to a straight-laced, bond-trading stepdad with more mobiles on his belt than batman has gadgets, Larry gets himself a security job at the American Museum of Natural History.

 

Larry lucks out - his new place of work turns out to be the kind of museum that any kid would sell their best Pokemon card to get a glimpse of. It's a place where miniatures, mannequins, statues and animal taxidermy come alive at night, and hurry back into the position before the grown-ups arrive in the morning. But when a Roman Centurion turns up one day in their gallows of the Western Frontier section, even the most incompetent Museum director (Ricky Gervais) realises that something's going on. 

 

 

Bringing new meaning to the phrase “history comes alive”, Larry is faced with neanderthals, woolly mammoths, miniature Mayans, a Roman general called Octavius (Steve Coogan) and a T-Rex who thinks it’s a puppy in a never-ending game of fetch. 

 

The film sometimes offers a refreshing take on well-worn historical stereotypes. Attila the Hun (Patrick Gallagher), comes across as sensitive, effete, and on the verge of an emotional breakdown. Larry stops his own limbs from being torn apart by the Hun Emperor by making a rainbow coloured handkerchief disappear, and then giving the old Hun a hug.

 

This is in sharp contrast to the Western belief of Attila the Hun as a monolithic force of all evil. Twentieth century books like Louis de Wohl’s novel Throne of the World and Thomas Costain’s The Darkness and the Dawn do little to reverse the view of the man as an awesome savage. Hopefully this film will encourage people to look deeper into his history. Uncovering facts about his fidelity to his word or his generous treatment of Roman emissaries might have people understand why Hungarians still regard him as a national hero and ‘Uncle Etzel’.

  

 

NATM can be compared to fantasy movies Westworld (1973), Futureworld (1976) and Jurassic Park (1993), which breath new life into inanimate objects and those long extinct.

 

The relationships that Larry forms are not only memorable enough to have inspired a sequel but are written in such a way as to encourage affectionate identification. The ‘giant’ Larry forms close friendships with two museum miniatures, Octavius and Jedediah (Owen Wilson), in scenes reminiscent of Gulliver’s travels in Lilliput. 

 

Octavius and Jedediah form a bizarre subplot themselves, in a road movie where ancient Rome and the Western frontier collide. And where, perhaps predictably, common ground is found between notions of imperialism, battling instinct and masculinity. 

 

One of the most endearing characters in the film is uncovered when Larry, through the process of learning about history, begins to take back control of the chaotic museum. In typically slapstick fashion he provides lighters to anxious cavemen and chewing gum to a giant CGI stone head who continually roars “Hey Dum-dum, give me gum-gum.”

 

Sure NATM has made-up Pharaohs based loosely on Egyptian Gods, and of course it has scrolls and tablets with fantastical powers. It definitely fails to acknowledge exactly which Roman emporer it is portraying or give time and credence to the Mayan race it pays lip service to. But it also has a general ethos at its core of learning more about history. And for anyone interested in the ancient world, or trying to inspire kids to be interested in the ancient world, that can only be a positive thing.