Butler's Cinema Scene

“BEING ELMO: A PUPPETEER’S JOURNEY” My rating: B  (Opening Jan. 6 at the Tivoli)

80 minutes | MPAA rating: PG

Documentaries can be many things, but sweet is not usually one of them.

“Being Elmo,” though, is just that. Sweet.

Kevin Clash, Elmo and friend

Sweet in the same way that a child bestowing a kiss upon a beloved grownup friend is disarmingly, heart-grippingly sweet.

The “Elmo” of the title isn’t a person. Not technically, anyway.

Elmo is a puppet of shaggy red felt, one of the Muppet characters who inhabit “Sesame Street” on the PBS network.

Physically he reminds a lot of Grover or Cookie Monster. His personality, though, is uniquely his own.  This is due entirely to the man who performs Elmo, Kevin Clash.

Clash is a black man, raised in borderline poverty in a not-so-good Baltimore neighborhood. But as a child he fell in love with puppets he saw on TV, began making his own (probably not the coolest pastime for a young man in the ‘hood) and by the time he was a teenager was a fixture on the Baltimore television scene.

Puppeteering took took him away from the gangs and helplessness of his upbringing and eventually steered him into the good graces of Muppet designer Kermit Love — who taught Clash just about everything he knew about puppeteering — and eventually onto the radar of Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets and the man behind Kermit the Frog.

Clash worked with several minor Muppet characters and then was given a chance to do Elmo, whose original puppeteer simply couldn’t find the right blend of personality and physicality to make the character memorable. In fact, Elmo was well on his way to being written out of the show when Clash took over.

Constance Marks and Philip Shane’s documentary does something quite wonderful in dissecting how, subtlety by subtlety, Elmo emerged as the most beloved Muppet of them all.

The key — and it has everything to do with Kevin Clash — is that Elmo represents pure, unadulterated, unambiguous love.

And the way children responded to him floored even seasoned “Sesame Street” hands.

“Being Elmo” is actually three stories in one. It’s a biography of Kevin Clash.

It’s a biography of sorts of the fictional Elmo.

And it’s also a biography of the whole Henson/Muppets phenomenon. Of course there are no shortages of films looking inside Henson Associates…the late Henson was scrupulous about documenting the behind-the-scenes aspects of his business. But this one is geared to Clash’s experiences with the enterprise, and that gives it a fresh, unique feel.

But there’s something more. “Being Elmo” examines our ability to invest our emotions in something/someone who’s not actually real but feels more real than reality itself.

Watch Kevin Clash visiting a school, one arm inside his Elmo puppet and clearly speaking Elmo’s dialogue.

And yet the kids don’t look at Kevin Clash at all. They are totally focused on Elmo, the shaggy red creation of cloth on the end of his arm.

Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg and featuring talking-head appearances by the likes of Frank Oz (the creator of Miss Piggy), Carol Spinney (Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird) and Rosie O’Donnell, “Being Elmo” has plenty of interesting information.

But what it delivers most successfully is more intangible, an appreciation of our need for make believe.

| Robert W. Butler