The trouble with writing a biography about a figure as boundlessly creative as Jim Henson – say, Brian Jay Jones’ Jim Henson: The Biography from 2013 – is that the book can go only so far in conveying that creativity. The sights, sounds, songs, and gags that define our picture of the man behind the Muppets must remain static on the page, preserved in the words of the author and his sources, or in photographic illustrations. While the new Ron Howard-directed documentary Jim Henson Idea Man lacks the breadth and depth of 600-some pages chronicling Henson’s local-TV breakthrough, the creation of Sesame Street, or the trying productions of fantasy epics The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, it has the advantage of simultaneously telling and showing about these phases of Henson’s life and work.
Here, the recollections of Henson's family and his closest collaborators can intermingle with dazzling behind-the-scenes footage and excerpts from his one-of-a-kind TV and film productions: Director and performer Frank Oz can recall the fateful Muppet Show ad lib that led to Miss Piggy karate chopping Kermit the Frog rather than slapping him, and Howard can then cut to a montage of the porcine glamor puss’ greatest hits. No knock on Jones’ exhaustive and indispensable work, but the stories of some towering showbiz geniuses really do benefit from a more active visual aid.
Idea Man almost works overtime in that capacity. When he died at age 53 in 1990, Henson left behind a vast, colorful, antic body of work that enlivens all 108 minutes of Howard’s documentary. Yet it’s some of Henson’s most underseen and unsung – and in some cases, unrealized – efforts that give shape and novelty to this otherwise conventional cradle-to-grave history. The very first character we see isn’t Kermit or Ernie or any other face familiar from years of broadcasts or mountains of merchandise – it’s Limbo, a floating set of eyes and a mouth that Henson used to explore abstract concepts like thought and memory. (The yarn-and-fog landscape of Limbo’s “organized mind” serve, cleverly, as connective tissue between Idea Man segments.)
Rummaging through the archive provides Howard – a far less imaginative visual stylist than his subject –with some intriguing imagery to draft off of. New interviews with the likes of Oz, Rita Moreno, Jennifer Connelly, and Henson’s four surviving children – Lisa, Cheryl, Brian, and Heather – take place against a backdrop reminiscent of The Cube, an existential TV drama that aired just nine months before the premiere of Sesame Street. The set is a solid metaphor for the thrill and the challenge of the blank page, and a too-obvious one for the constraints Henson sometimes worried were created by his work in the fields of puppetry and children’s television.
Perhaps these bells and whistles are necessary to put a little extra spark into a story whose main character was famously driven, even-keeled, and reluctant to talk about himself at any great length. This, combined with the fact that few who encountered Henson ever had a bad word to say about him, can lead to a lack of dimension at the center of Idea Man. His children cast some shadows with stories of the tension between their father and their mother, Jane, but Howard practices a light touch there. These moments come across more like an attempt to give Henson’s first collaborator – and, as Lisa Henson tells it, the Muppet organization’s top talent scout – her due. If anything, the fond recollections and on-set camaraderie reflected in Idea Man are stakes driven into the seemingly undying notion that there must be some sort of darkness or disturbance lurking beneath the surface of any entertainer possessed by Henson’s optimism or generosity. (By sheer coincidence, the latest incarnation of this tiresome cliché, Eric, premieres the same weekend as Idea Man.)
The sharpest image of Henson that Howard captures is that of a man in a race against the clock. It’s another theme that shows the fuzzy boundaries between life and work depicted in Idea Man, whether it’s in excerpts the Oscar-nominated short “Timepiece” or in the Hensons remembering their dad leaping from continent to continent and project to project at the height of his success. There was never enough time for Henson, and, unfortunately, there’s not enough time for this movie, either – the urgent tick-tock laced into the sound mix winds up becoming Idea Man’s worst enemy. Despite some judicious pacing, major topics get squeezed out: Fraggle Rock, the last indisputable triumph of Henson’s career, gets thrown into a montage alongside the ambitious failures of The Storyteller and The Jim Henson Hour.
Idea Man is the source of some remarkably crisp remastered Muppet rarities – including a riotous string of slapstick sales pitches for various regional brands of bread, coffee, and meat – and increasingly precious confessionals from the people who shared the screen with Henson. Yet it’s hard to walk away from it without wanting a little bit more: More insight, more material that isn’t repurposed from previous retrospectives, more of an idea of the man at the center of Idea Man. That’s the true benefit of all the clips surrounding and supporting all these interviews: The reminder that the question “Who was Jim Henson?” is best answered by the art he produced in his lifetime – much of which can be cued up as soon as the credits roll on Idea Man.
