Action cinema is filthy with men of few words, the strong and silent types who say more with less. Even within that grand tradition, however, the meteoric rise of Groot—one of the five misfit headliners of the year’s biggest hit, Guardians Of The Galaxy—has to be seen as a new victory for terseness. Pulled from the comic-book pages of the film’s source material, Groot is basically a talking tree, though he can only say three words, always in the same order: “I am Groot.” So why have audiences fallen in love with the monosyllabic guy? In even fewer words: inflection. Vin Diesel, who voices Groot, manages to convey a wide range of emotions simply by delivering his one-sentence mantra in a slightly different tone each time. And given how limited the character’s vocabulary is, a climactic deviation off-script is as affecting as intended. It helps, of course, that Groot is such a charmingly slapstick CGI creation—a gentle giant whose shtick would be right at home in the silent era, when movie characters basically had to communicate with no words. For all the talk of how Guardians has rocketed Chris Pratt onto the A-list, the film’s true star goes by a different name. He’ll tell you it himself. [A.A. Dowd]
