****/****
screenplay by Peter Sohn & Kat Likkel and Brenda Hsueh
directed by Peter Sohn
by Walter Chaw I tell this tale over and over again as I see echoes of it pop up now in a landscape temporarily interested in the particulars of the immigrant story, but my parents came to the United States in the early ’70s to complete their educations: my mother her Master’s in Secondary Education, my father a Ph.D. in Geochemical Engineering. They settled in Golden, Colorado, in the cradle of the Rocky Mountains, after getting married at the Justice of the Peace, saying their vows phonetically and anglicizing our family name before my father really knew how to write in English–if you were ever wondering why it is my name is spelled “Chaw” when it was more common to go by “Chow” or “Cho” or “Chou.” My dad, he did his best. Rather than teach or pursue a career in mineral mining or oil, he decided he wanted to be his own boss. His temperament, I think, made it hard for him to work for someone else. So he opened a rock shop in Golden, learned silversmithing, and made and repaired jewelry. I don’t know if it was his dream to do this, but it’s what he did for the rest of his life until the stress and misery of it killed him at 54. My mom was pulled into it with him but quit when he died. I disappointed them both long before that, changing my major from Biochemical Engineering to English long about the time I ran into Differential Equations freshman year. We were estranged until my wife insisted we invite them to our wedding. My wife is the angel of my better nature and guardian of the tatters of my soul.
Peter Sohn’s Elemental is the story of a young immigrant woman, Ember (voiced with brass by Leah Lewis), fated to take over her family’s small business once she’s proven she’s armoured enough against the barbs of the retail-service industry. Her father, Bernie (Ronnie Del Carmen), is aging and ailing, and her mother, Cinder (Shila Ommi), is ready for a change, but Ember can’t quite seem to rein in her frustrations with the little humiliations that come with a job trying to satisfy the mercurial, often unrealistic desires of others. She lives in the “fire town” section of “Elemental City,” where her people, many relocated from a natural disaster in their homeland, keep to themselves. The city’s ruling majority are beings made of water (fire’s archenemy, of course), with other inhabitants made of air and earth/vegetable. It’s clear the fire people are the odd men out, and signs saying “No Fire” ensure they’re reminded of their place. They’re a proud people, the fire people, with a rich food and arts culture they protect jealously from outsiders–who rarely venture amongst their midst in any case. Ember has told herself that becoming a shopkeeper is a fine future because it’s the only world she’s ever known: a stranger marooned in the middle of hostile bigots. She tells herself this because she knows how much her parents have sacrificed, and the only sacrifice that could match it is her own life.
Her mother and father’s humiliation begins years before, when Bernie and a pregnant Cinder, whose parents’ disapproval trails behind them like a dragged anchor, arrive alone and largely unwelcome in Elemental City. A well-meaning official at alien onboarding declines to learn how to say and write their roaring-inferno-sounding names, dubbing them with fire puns instead. I’m reminded of the names given the aliens in Graham Baker’s Alien Nation, and of course of the anglicized names assigned to people passing through Ellis Island by officials who couldn’t be bothered getting it even close to right. The robbing of Bernie and Cinder of their names in exchange for a fresh start in a new place isn’t made to be a huge event in the film. My parents, I know, certainly didn’t see giving up their names for ones easier for our white hosts to pronounce as anything other than a convenience, if not actually a kindness. I think they were only grateful to be allowed into a country that had explicitly forbidden their emigration and citizenship per federal law for most of their lives. But it is a big deal. When you take someone’s name from them, you begin to chip away at their dignity, their history, their sense of value.
One day, through a series of misadventures inaugurated by Ember’s tantrums, Ember meets a mild-mannered city worker named Wade (Mamoudou Athie), a “water person” who cites Bernie’s business with multiple violations of the city’s code, which will inevitably lead to it being shut down. I have been a part of and witnessed dozens of struggles between members of my larger immigrant family and local officials who are maybe doing their jobs or maybe harassing a group of people who have gained a reputation for filth and disease from centuries of scapegoating and xenophobia. The code-violation part of Elemental is the catalyst for much of the narrative action (Ember and Wade must fix the source of the violations in time to prevent the store’s closure), and it hit me–like the name-changing–right in the viscera. It’s an aspect of the immigrant experience I see represented neither often nor well in mainstream American cinema. I love how Wade can’t really eat Ember’s traditional foods, but is very pleased with himself when he figures out he can water it down to make it “better.” I also love a dinner Ember has with Wade’s family that first showcases how open and loving they are with one another–how comfortable they are, emotionally speaking, at odds with how coded Ember’s worry must be for her father. Then one of Wade’s uncles “compliments” Ember on how well-spoken she is, and Ember, with the practice of someone who’s done this a lot, jabs back how that’s probably because she was born in Elemental City and this language is, in fact, her native one.
Elemental is a film predicated around a single, broad metaphor for race that constructs no straw men in its execution. Fire and water don’t mix, yes, and yet the combination of fire and water, when the light of one is focused through the refracted qualities of the other, can make a rainbow, a laser beam, all manner of creative and destructive interplays and reactions. A glass pitcher breaks during that dinner, and Ember uses her heat to melt the shards into a malleable slab, reform it into a pocket, blow it into a pitcher, and decorate it with coloured sand. She’s a natural-born artist slotted into a future contrary to her inclinations, and the ease with which Wade’s wealthy, privileged mother (Catharine O’Hara) gets her an internship at a glass shop outside of town is both wonderful in its generosity and galling in its presumption. Ember reacts accordingly, rejecting Wade’s world to return to her own.
It’s easy to become cynical about the way things are, discouraged by how slowly things change if they change at all. Elemental doesn’t think you’re wrong about any of that: race is America’s Achilles heel. It will destroy us. But in a dozen tiny ways, the picture confirms we don’t have to understand everything to know enough to save each other. I thought of Keats’s “Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty, that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” at the end of his ode to the eternity buried in our art. Elemental is in love with the beauty in the smoky, streaked strength of tempered glass. It is in love with a massive plant that can survive anywhere being awakened after years of sleep by a little flame in a diving bell. In love, too, with how this plant is the metaphor for a child’s memories of hope, ageless but tangled with the trauma of her difference in a culture that won’t accept her. Finally, it is in love with a young man raised to express himself through his heart rather than with his fists. When Ember leaves Wade because she recognizes he will never experience the prejudice she encounters (nor will he ever know the societal pressures of the underprivileged and the alien), he doesn’t protest. The lesson of Elemental is that empathy isn’t walking a mile in another’s shoes but recognizing the journey for others has been as fraught as yours, and offering companionship the rest of the way. As naive as he is, Wade is ready to sacrifice himself so Ember can rescue not her parents, but a thing that ties her family back to a country that has turned its back on them, even though they could never turn their back on it. He doesn’t get it, but he knows it means something to Ember, and that’s enough. We miss out on a lot when we expect to be completely understood; all we should ever want is to be completely loved. Elemental is about that. Ember loves Wade, and Wade loves her back. He is the guardian of her better nature.
