Catching The Sheep Detectives yesterday afternoon wasn’t my idea — it was a West Orange Sutton detour. It was the first time I’d watched a theatrical film with her. To what extent did this formulaic, family-friendly Agatha Christie thing win Sutton over? She seemed vaguely distracted but not bored or irritated; ditto myself.
Set in a small, bucolic, storybook English village surrounded by hundreds of acres of hilly grass fields, pic focuses on two communities — the provincial, plodding humans and the timid but secretly English-speaking sheep/rams, one of whom is a regular Miss Marple when it comes to suspecting who’s who and what’s what.
Hugh Jackman is advertised as the lead, but his English shepherd character is basically a red herring. He’s dead (poisoned) before you know it, and the rest of the film is about Succession‘s Nicholas Braun, playing a flatfoot constable, trying to deductively identify the murderer, Hercule Poirot-style.
The sharp-eyed, English-speaking woolies, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bryan Cranston, Chris O’Dowd, Regina Hall, Patrick Stewart and the loathsome Bella Ramsey, are…well, more soulful and vulnerably human than the humans.
The four-leggers believe that when you die you transform into a big white cloud….a nice idea that isn’t much different than the human notion about growing a pair of white angel wings after your heart ceases to beat. (Will Donald Trump grow a pair when his time comes? Or will a team of brown, growling gremlins surround his ass and take him straight to the molten caverns of hell?)
I personally related to a small “winter lamb”, shunned by the herd because he/she was born during the cold months and not during the politically correct spring season. Before I got going as a movie journalist in the ’80s I was the very essence of a winter lamb. and even today my basic attitude about the spring herd is “you can all go fug yahselves.” I don’t mean every last ewe and ram — I’m cool with the ones who are extra-perceptive or are otherwise possessed by decency and/or compassion.
