Review of The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) by Chads. — 07 Jul 2008
When the daft old woman who converses with flowers was a child, she told authorities the truth about her missing father and the jagged gashes on her arm. Since the girl's pa was vaporized in midair levitation by a vortex of whorling white moths, and her nasty cuts came about from a confrontation with malevolent woodland creatures from another realm, she should've lied.
The old woman is named Lucinda Spiderwick(Joan Plowright). Her father Arthur(David Strathairn) wrote a field guide that collated in totality all the otherworldly creatures that roamed in the woods of his backyard.
As any writer will tell you, the act of edifying fabrications onto paper alchemizes lies into half-truths, as the flight of fancy transports the reader into a world of its own making. In "The Spiderwick Chronicles", Arthur's scholarly pursuits literally isolates him from the people he loves, and Lucinda, like many children of self-absorbed intellectuals, grew up without a father.
When the Grace children coaxes Lucinda into talking about her father's book "Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical", the viewer realizes that Lucinda would sound like a madwoman in any other context, except for the context of the sci-fi/fantasy genre.
The authorities who institutionalized Lucinda mistook her lucid report of the fourth dimension as the rantings of a severely disturbed child. But Jared Grace(Freddy Highmore) knows that the old woman isn't off her rocker, and so does his twin brother Simon and sister Mallory(Sarah Bolger).
The Grace children are like home-schooled Harry Potters. They don't have to board a magic train that's headed towards some haute-toite school of hocus-pocus for enchantment. That's why "The Spiderwick Chronicles" has more in common with the aesthetics of eighties-era Spielberg than the J.
K. Rowling books. Bits of "E.T.", "Gremlins", "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom", and "The Goonies" can be gleaned from this sometimes astute children's film about how a father's compartmentalization of his interior life sprung a leak and spilled over into his personal one.
All the nifty CGI effects in the world can't hide the fact that "The Spiderwick Chronicles" is actually a movie about a derelict dad.
This review of The Spiderwick Chronicles (2008) was written by Chads. on 07 Jul 2008.
The Spiderwick Chronicles has generally received positive reviews.
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