The most helpful way to introduce Amélie is to use the film’s full title in France: The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain. After a ho-hum pair of decades to start out her earthly life, the news of Princess Di's death oh so circuitously leads Amélie to find a box of a boy's treasures from forty years prior. She tracks down the boy-turned-man, anonymously leaves him his box, watches his joy upon joy, and has a revelation. This is her role in her life. This is what she will become: a clandestine cherub who makes others happy. She describes the bustle on a street for a blind man. She brings together a loveless patron and a loveless worker in her café. To comfort a friend, she forges a love letter from a long dead lover. For reasons I will not divulge, she procures pictures of the worldwide journey of a gnome.

When Amélie is quite happy, Amélie is quite enjoyable. Watching someone find their true calling and acting upon it is an oddly fascinating subject for a film - even if Amélie gets in a typical romantic quandary - and her joy becomes our joy. (Audrey Tautou either gives a great performance or is perfectly cast as Amélie; she portrays a mix of shyness and craftiness that’s odd but believable, and I seriously wonder if that’s also the personality of Ms. Tautou.) For that reason, it's jolting when Amélie's perfect world finally pops, albeit temporarily: one of her plans jogs along for a time, then faints. But things for our heroine get back to “normal” - that is, normal perfection - and all strangely feels right. Given my preference for films that are only slightly skewed from naturalism, I was initially confused why I'd prefer Amélie when Amélie has the Midas touch than when the young lady ain't perfect.

By the end of the film, when everything but that singular plan eventually had fallen under her spell, I knew why: Amélie's normalcy is the one we'd like to have. It's a sexy lie, that effortless spreading of good karma to the populace. Amélie makes making people happy so easy, so part of her essence, that I'm envious. Forget about being Mother Theresa with the caring for the sick and the vow of poverty; I'd love to fulfill people's lives while flipping channels or writing a haiku or, like Amélie, putting together a video tape mix.

Amélie's director and writer Jean-Pierre Jeunet is aware that making others happy isn't as easy as it is for Amélie; the film is pitched at such a frantic, fun level that the perception of realism isn't likely. (Amélie is stylized similarly to this year’s Moulin Rouge: appealingly gaudy and calling attention to itself.) Given that the film isn’t meant to be a levelheaded research paper, Amélie's lie is actually useful: no, I'm not likely to come up with a scenario where photographing a gnome will help others, but like the title character, I'm more likely to do a good deed if I convince myself that I want to do it. It’s almost like “Sesame Street” in how Mr. Jeunet makes doing good fun.

And so Amélie is at its worst - if funniest - when Mr. Jeunet looks at the inverse of the original thesis: if good people deserve good things, then bad people deserve bad things. (This inverted thesis is not likely uttered by Big Bird.) Amélie's nemesis is a Snidely Whiplash bad guy with no good traits and a wheelbarrow full of bad ones. She gets a key to his apartment and does funny things right out of a hypothetical great French remake of Home Alone. (Her actions are less violent than Alone’s paint bucket to the face, but similar; perhaps they’re akin to a wooden paint mixer in the face.) Amélie must think it necessary to right the wrongs in her insular world in both directions, but punishing this wicked soul seems the antithesis of Amélie’s primary dogma: make people happy. It makes Ms. Poulain seem a bit mean herself.

Regardless, Amélie and Amélie are generally enchanting, and the small ideological problems I have with the film are caused by the film - gasp! - trying to be about something. Unlike Ocean’s Eleven, a film that on the surface feels as weightless as Amélie, there is more than air in Amélie’s soufflé.

Reprinted from the January 2002 issue of the Spring Hill Review. Used with permission.

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