A friend of mine, generally not finicky, refuses to eat octopus. “I just can’t eat any creature that’s smarter than I am,” he says, and he’s got a point. Octopuses are adept at problem solving and hiding themselves from prey. They can use tools. They can distinguish one human face from another. They even, possibly, have a sense of humor. All of those things might be enough to make you think twice about consuming that grilled, tentacled thing on your plate.Parts of Netflix’s Remarkably Bright Creatures, directed by Olivia Newman and adapted from Shelby Van Pelt’s 2022 novel, might have the same effect. Sally Field plays Tova Sullivan, an elderly widow who works nights as a cleaning lady at an aquarium on Puget Sound. Even though wiping away each day’s worth of schoolkid grime is hardly anybody’s idea of fun, Tova is OK with her job: nighttime solitude suits her, and she finds herself bonded with one of the aquarium’s star attractions, a wiseacre octopus named Marcellus.We know Marcellus is a smartie because we can hear his thoughts—they’re voiced by Alfred Molina—and he has lots of feelings about humans. He doesn’t like living in captivity. “There’s no quiet like the bottom of the sea,” he says, gazing at a gaggle of noisy kids with his perceptive, penetrating eyes. Grownups aren’t necessarily better. “I am subservient to a species beneath me in every observable metric,” he laments.Still, Marcellus is alive to beauty: he notes that the fingerprints schoolchildren leave on the glass…
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