For some terrible reason, it’s become fashionable to hate on Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Near as I’ve been able to tell, it’s because of his sometimes embarrassing fanbase aping his style, going viral with things like a Dr. Fauci-themed parody of Hamilton’s “My Shot”. Hamilton’s reached a lot of people, a substantial number of them cringey whites apparently, and while that’s well and good to laugh at, I see too many people that turn that into scorn for LMM himself.
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The TikToks are cringe and sound like LMM, so therefore LMM must also be cringe.
Please indulge in a brief aside, but Hamilton was never for everyone, though I don’t know that every complaint of it was legitimate. Speaking as a lifelong hip-hop head, the music is legit. It also did things with race that was too much for some to reconcile, for example making the likes of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson black. It’s race as metaphor, telling a metatextual story that informs and enhances everything else about it. Race is a social construct, and Hamilton wants you to confront our country’s longest-held point of contention. Sometimes those negative reactions are just how a work of art affects an audience. As with In the Heights and those that had “never been north of 96th street,” it both is and isn’t for them.
So how is Encanto, with original songs by LMM and telling a story close to his heritage? Among the new CGI Disney films, it’s the best of the pack. It’s much less fetch-questy in its plot and overly pleased with itself in its meta humor than its closest cousins Moana and Raya: The Last Dragon, and I barely even noticed the Alan Tudyk-voiced animal comic relief this time (he’s a very charming toucan). If social media continues to be the yardstick, it’s definitely finding its audience.
Encanto’s story is of a family that derives magical abilities from the head of their clan, Abuela Alma Madrigal, complete with a sentient house that responds to their requests and makes extra-dimensional bedrooms for each of them that are tailored to their gift. The popular standout is Luisa, a big sister with a deep voice, super strength, a seriously catchy pop song, as well as for my money the funniest moments in the film once the plot is underway.
The first sign that everything is not as it seems comes with the fantastically comical aside that one relative gained the power to see the future and immediately disappeared, with the knee jerk reaction of everyone in earshot being, “We don’t talk about Bruno!” Not sketchy at all, movie. That couldn’t possibly be a thing that comes up later. (I love it.) We also learn that Mirabel, our P.
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O.V. to this world, is the only member of the family to not get powers at all, and with that the cracks begin to reveal themselves.
If the film has an antagonist, it’s Abuela Alma, leading her family in the way she knows best, but in a way that runs counter to the easily dismissed Mirabel.
Our protagonist’s problem is that no one can speak against the head of the family. It may not be familiar to every person’s home situation, but no one and nothing could have defied what my lola said, and her being the source of magic powers wouldn’t have made that any better. Easier to bite your tongue until you were out of her sight than suffer that icy wrath, holiday after holiday. Suffice it to say, Mirabel is screwed here. She’ll find no allies if she outwardly defies her abuela, and I definitely sympathize with her father nervously trying to keep in peaceful denial until safely away from his mother-in-law’s gaze. What the abuela doesn’t understand is that Mirabel is a lot more like her than anyone else; it’s no coincidence that Mirabel is the one speaking to Casito to move objects while others drag or repair fixtures by hand.
The high-wire act of musicals is a polyphony, where melodies from multiple perspectives play over each other and intertwine into a new whole. Some are definitely better than others. I’ll point to the one with the supporting characters of The Phantom of the Opera as a lesser version of this that nonetheless sticks around in my head, using its time to rehash perspectives that you’d rather weren’t sung at all, let alone all at once. Encanto’s best song, “We Don’t Talk about Bruno,” hilariously featuring everyone talking about Bruno while setting the dinner table. Setting aside that the song seriously moves, it’s also very clever story development, sneaking in details and foreshadowing about each of them, and it’s no surprise at all when the family immediately gossips right after.
Encanto definitely brings the feels, something that LMM’s music has always been good at (see the kid’s duel and aftermath in Hamilton, Abuela Claudia’s song “Paciencia Y Fe” in In the Heights, and his directing of last year’s Tick, Tick, Boom, despite the music not being his). There is a stunning and humanizing song in Encanto sung entirely in Spanish that recontextualizes key points of the conflict, and LMM won’t be satisfied until every person listening shares in its misery and heartache.
Encanto brings it fully home and stays with you, and I suspect it’s the music making the magic happen. It’s hard to imagine a version of this story without songs working nearly as well, and it’s no surprise that Lin-Manuel Miranda also has a “story by” credit.
The foundation is good, so to speak, so the house that is built upon it is a strong one.
