The Banality of Magic: The Tooth Fairy

Before watching this, I couldn't help envisaging a children's film starring the terrifying serial killer in Red Dragon. And sure enough, the sinister implications of a job which involves intruding into people's homes at night and visiting their children as they lie alone in their beds is something the film can never quite conquer, despite the acquiesence of the child characters. It's made worse by the outfit that its hero settles on to play the Tooth Fairy - a combination of Disney fairy and ice hockey uniform, one of the looks favoured by scary characters in slasher movies, not to mention his charming habit of spraying an 'amnesiac-spray', which seems like CS gas, into people's faces to stop them questioning him. What a mischievous man!

But this is not the most problematic contradiction in the movie. Almost the last line in the movie is when the elf-like creature played by Billy Crystal yells 'I love my job!' as he sits on a goal-bound ice-hockey puck. It's amazing how important work is to Hollywood kids movies. The Tooth Fairy is another example (see Santa Claus or Monsters Inc.) of Hollywood's determination to show us that magic is a particular kind of work. It's almost impossible to immerse yourself in the movie without grappling with the obvious irony upon which it rests. In a world in which 'children just don't believe anymore', the movie sets out to demonstrate that magic really happens, and anyone can 'believe'. It does this by propelling its cynical, charmless hero, Derek Thompson (played quite appropriately, if not deliberately, without an iota of charm by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) into the world of the tooth fairy. Having been on the point of telling his girlfriend's six-year-old daughter that the tooth fairy does not exist (to get himself off the hook from stealing her tooth money) Derek is suddenly sentenced to a week's community service where he has to become a tooth fairy. And, surprise surprise, what does Fairyland look like but a large US corporation in which hierarchies are rigidly sustained, employees are cynical yet continue to do their jobs, and the whole operation depends upon a series of tried-and-tested processes being applied smoothly and without question. It's a kind of strange 'reverse-Marxism': the Hollywood machine seeks to uphold the values of magic by demystifying them, revealing that the escapist fantasy-world which provides the antidote to the dreary world of reality (signified here by Derek's declining career as a once-lauded ice hockey pro) in fact runs on precisely the same principles. Magic, in other words, needs to be run like a large business. More than this, to really change things does not require magic so much as hard work, energy and focus: this is how Derek finally rescues himself from a boorish hell, by working damn hard.