The Wachowski Brothers' Confessional

The most important part of Speed Racer comes at the beginning. After the evil Royalton tries to entice Speed to join his racing team by showing off his corporate empire, Pops Racer says, "I wasn't impressed. I was intimidated—people with that much money think they can control everything!" That line pretty much sums up the film. Speed Racer is a confessional, a purification ritual performed by the Wachowski brothers to cleanse themselves from the need to seduce and impress audiences with physics-bending photorealistic visual effects. Taking the opposite approach, they flatten and cheapen the look of the film substituting low-tech style for visual intimidation. The idea, like the theme of the Speed Racer itself, is that sheer aesthetic virtuosity can transcend money and power. Says Mrs. Racer to Speed—"when I go to the races, I go to watch you make art and it's beautiful and inspiring and everything that art should be."

However, the visual coding of the film is such that only a highly refined sensibility can tell the difference between a Speed Racer shot and a conventional green screen shot. Speed Racer was shot mostly green screen using a Sony Cine Alta digital camera. But instead of going for realism, the directors and DP David Tattersall deconstructed traditional cinematography using an approach they called "faux lensing." Via compositing they were able to "use a medium-wide lens for the foreground and a super-long lens for the background"—a physical impossibility (American Cinematographer, May 2008). For the Wachowskis this might indeed be "faux lensing" but for the rest of us, it's just cheap-looking green screen shot with a video camera. Speed Racer is a connoisseur's vision of cheapness, the kind only 100 million dollars can buy.

The film is therefore driven by a peculiar ambition. It wants to celebrate the bright, sparkling vitality of child-like vision but it does so through the cultivated eyes of an aesthete. It's like trying to give your five year old pizza from Whole Foods. It looks like pizza, but he won't eat it because it's flecked with radicchio and goat cheese. Unlike Robert Rodriguez, the Wachowskis are just too refined to give us an inexpensive cheap-looking kid's movie. In Speed Racer, the Wachowskis forgot one critical thing. As in The Matrix, audiences probably want to be sucked into a convincing simulation of reality, not gaze at the glossy surfaces of art in motion. In the end, boys are more like Royalton than the super-flat Speed; they want to be seduced by power, not style.