The Tearjerker with the Octopus

I read a lot of books, but to be honest, not a lot stick with me after I’ve finished the last page. One particular genre, however, does seem to have much more staying power in my mind: the found family. It’s why Fredrik Backman (My Friends, A Man Called Ove) has become my favorite author. It’s why Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent and Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine have found so much success. There’s just something about lonely characters finding their people that is often far more satisfying than a plot twist or a successful heist or solving a murder.

Shelby Van Pelt’s Remarkably Bright Creatures is one of the more successful entries in that genre over the last decade, and thanks to streaming (and sometimes, Tom Hanks), these character-driven dramas are being adapted again. I couldn’t be more thankful. Olivia Newman’s film (Where the Crawdads Sing) is a fine adaptation for Netflix that, like the novel upon which it is based, has a huge heart, ordinary characters, and an octopus named Marcellus at the center of it all.

The movie concerns an older woman named Tova (Sally Field), who has recently lost her husband, a couple of decades after losing her son under tragic circumstances. She’s a lonely woman who largely avoids people, choosing to work the night shift at the local aquarium as a cleaning lady to keep herself busy. There, she’s befriended Marcellus (voiced by Alfred Molina), who occasionally escapes his tank at opportune moments to move the plot along.

Cameron (Lewis Pullman) is a bit of a layabout whose van breaks down in Tova’s small, seaside town, where he’s searching for his biological father. After Tova injures her ankle, Cameron fills in as the night-shift cleaner, and the two forge an unlikely bond. He needs support and structure; she needs, honestly, someone for whom to care after the deaths of her husband and son. As the two help fill the respective holes in each other’s hearts, their world gets bigger, more people are drawn into their circle, and a new family of sorts is formed. Thanks, again, to the octopus.

Shelby Van Pelt’s book is richer — as books tend to be — but I am so very happy that Netflix didn’t try to squeeze a limited series out of this one. If you want to spend more time with these characters, read the book. The character-driven plot here, however, is best suited to a feature-length film, which is more than enough time to tell the story and, in the capable hands of Olivia Newman, capture the soul of the novel.

Remarkably Bright Creatures is not a movie that’s going to rattle you. It’s not trying to (it is slightly reminiscent of the Mother’s Day movie parody on SNL this week). What it wants to do is sit beside you for two hours, introduce you to people worth knowing, and remind you that the families we build for ourselves are often the ones that save us. Sally Field is wonderful in a role that could have tipped into mawkishness and never does. Lewis Pullman is great, too. And Marcellus — the goddamn octopus — is, improbably, the emotional core of all of it. (I’ve seen worse reasons to feel things.) If you read the book and loved it, you’ll find this a faithful and warm adaptation. If you haven’t, this is a perfectly good place to start.