In the 1990s TV series "Wings," Thomas Haden Church gave his slightly dimwitted airplane mechanic a unique nobility. Something about the artificially stiff or stilted way he delivered the most banal of lines — hands on the hips of his dirty workman's jumpsuit, chest out, chin raised — as if his character Lowell's simplistic statements imparted great wisdom.
With Church behind the microphone in DreamWorks' animated animal adventure "Over the Hedge," it's almost as if Lowell got a new job as a persistent pest exterminator.
Church joins an impressive cast of celebrity voices, including Bruce Willis, Garry Shandling, Wanda Sykes, Nick Nolte, William Shatner, Eugene Levy and teen rocker Avril Lavigne. A forest of animals awakens from hibernation to find a suburban real-estate development encroaching on their neck of the woods. Led by a manipulative raccoon voiced by Willis, the dysfunctional family of animals crosses over the hedge to steal the gastronomical bounty of their new neighbors' trash.
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Enter exterminator Dwayne — hands on the hips of his dirty workman's jumpsuit, chest out, chin raised — imparting words of simplistic wisdom with all the deliberate, stilted nobility of, well, a familiar airplane mechanic.
It's as if the part was written for Lowell, or at least for the actor who played him. It wasn't, but the suggestion got a big laugh out of Church.
"That's funny," he said, on the phone from his ranch west of Austin, Texas, "because when we were rehearsing for (his recent film) 'Sideways,' (the director) said the same thing. He said, 'Sometimes you deliver lines almost as if there were italics surrounding some of the things you say. It's the way you emphasize certain moments.' I hadn't thought about it, but I guess I do."
It's a unique style of overwrought elocution that wouldn't work for most performers. But instead of sounding rehearsed and pompous, Church somehow makes it seem perfectly natural — particularly in the vocal projection of a computer-generated pest exterminator with delusions of grandeur.
Years of voice work in the frequency-modulated radio world may account for the vocal trademark. Or perhaps, as Church suggested, "Maybe there's a bridge between those two characters in a way that I wasn't conscious of: Both wear jumpsuits and tool belts."
Church brings great charisma to balding Dwayne, a comb-over character whose mission in life is to end the life of any critter brazen enough to peek "over the hedge." As the family of animals grows increasingly ingenious in the quest for trash, Dwayne resorts to increasingly bizarre weapons in funny scenes of animated violence.
But under the direction of Tim Johnson ("Antz") and Karey Kirkpatrick (screenplay of "Chicken Run"), "Over the Hedge" is neither an action-adventure drama nor an environmentalist poke at urban sprawl.
"It really is about family unity," says Church. "In one of the most powerful moments in the movie, the turtle Verne (Shandling) rants that the others are too stupid to know they're being manipulated by (the raccoon). And Hammy the squirrel (Steve Carell) says in this sad, sad voice, 'I'm not stupid.' It gives you goosebumps. The message is: In the pursuit of your self-interest, don't be attacking or diminishing. It's a really powerful moment . . . a poignant family message."
Later this year, Church will appear in AMC's "Broken Trail," a cowboy miniseries with Robert Duvall. Then he'll go behind the mike again as the voice of a farm animal in a live-action remake of E.B. White's classic children's story "Charlotte's Web." In 2007, Church will be seen and heard again as Sandman, the villain in "Spider-Man 3."
