‘Remarkably Bright Creatures’ Review: Sally Field and Lewis Pullman Help Each Other Heal in a Melodrama of Distinctly Average Intelligence

Are people still firing up “My Octopus Teacher” on Netflix? The viral success of that documentary felt like a peak-pandemic phenomenon, when some of us were sufficiently starved for connection with both the natural world and our fellow humans that its thin anthropomorphic musings rang true. If it has a place in anyone’s heart today, however, then so will “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” a fictional bouillabaise of moist-eyed melodrama, marine-life metaphor and all-purpose cod philosophy that, were it not title-bound to the bestseller it’s based on, could have opportunistically been called “My Octopus Therapist” for its Netflix debut.

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The creature in question is Marcellus, a venerable, handsomely rust-colored specimen of giant Pacific octopus who serves as the film’s miraculously omniscient narrator. Archly voiced by Alfred Molina, he has an intimate understanding of the various personal crises nurtured by an otherwise human cast of characters, playing out far beyond the glass enclosure in the small-town American aquarium where he’s lived in captivity the last few years. How can Marcellus know the intricate workings of the human heart, much less the specific secrets held by quietly grieving widow Tova (Sally Field), who works as the aquarium’s night cleaner? Well, because he listens as she jabbers away to him, absorbing and interpreting her story with an Oprah-level EQ as uncanny as his sleek CGI appearance, and ultimately even doing some logical sleuthing to solve a lingering mystery from her past.

If that strikes you as twee or downright silly, Olivia Newman‘s touchy-feely weepie is not on your wavelength. A book-club favorite upon its publication in 2022, Shelby Van Pelt’s source novel already required high whimsy tolerance from its reader; that goes double for the film, as it gives actual voice and form to its guiding, non-human perspective. But the story that gradually unfolds in “Remarkably Bright Creatures” proves very nearly as improbable as its teller. A hokey pileup of intersecting destinies and cornball coincidence, it hardly matches Marcellus’ own aloof intellectual tone — unless he’s deliberately dumbing down the tale for us humans, a species he declares to be “beneath me in every observable metric.”

At any rate, this is the most snugly tailored leading vehicle Field has had since 2015’s “Hello, My Name is Doris,” with its charms heavily reliant on her signature balance of frazzled maternal empathy and can-do pluck. For years, Tova has been living alone in the sleepy Pacific Northwest town she calls home, since the deaths of her husband and only son — the latter in still-murky circumstances. Though she belongs to a local knitting circle, and weathers the flirtations of kindly shopkeeper Ethan (Colm Meaney), she’s mostly a loner: Her most content hours are those spent cleaning at the aquarium, chattering away to Marcellus, until a mishap on the job takes her out of commission for several weeks.

Reluctantly hired to fill in for her is Cameron (Lewis Pullman), a scruffy drifter newly blown into town with some unfinished family business to attend to. He at first resents her fussily telling him how to do the job; she at first resents his general slacker demeanor. No prizes for guessing that a generation-spanning friendship will soon grow from these brittle beginnings, though there’s more connecting these two wounded souls than initially meets the eye. As the melodramatic machinery of Newman and John Whittington’s script starts up, the exact nature of that connection is quite plainly telegraphed, though it takes an awfully long time to get to the full reveal: For nearly two hours, the dramatic construction of “Remarkably Bright Creatures” rests heavily on certain questions remaining oddly unasked in a neighborhood where everybody knows everybody.

Field’s neurotic, kvetching energy and Pullman’s drawlingly laidback presence spark off each other to amiable and spontaneous effect — enough so to show up the contrivances in the film’s secondary characters and subplots. Cameron’s half-hearted romance with flinty local surf-shop owner Avery (Sofia Black-D’Elia) could be excised at no great cost to proceedings, while actors as fine as Joan Chen and Kathy Baker are wholly wasted as Tova’s interchangeable friends: The community portraiture here feels more sitcom-like than convincingly lived-in. Meanwhile, the more heavily the script relies on Molina’s voiceover to piece together some seismic late-film revelations, the more the device grates, as Marcellus is promoted from general dispenser of fortune-cookie counsel (observing early and often that he and Tova both need to break free) to all-out deus ex mollusca.

Newman previously directed “Where the Crawdads Sing,” and has form in treating this kind of homey populist literature with an affectionately soft touch — the millions who thrilled to “Remarkably Bright Creatures” on the page should find the film on point in all departments from writing to casting to its cozy-cloudy look on screen. It is, however, the find of loyal adaptation that, at least in the eyes of the unconverted, shows up the deficiencies of the source material. Heavy on benevolent feeling and shy of outright human conflict, the film floats and sprawls and spirals like the creature to which it’s glowingly in thrall, but a bit of spine wouldn’t go amiss.