Spielberg’s gigantic tale
For someone so adept at directing children, Steven Spielberg has had spotty success with filming children’s books. There was Hook, which no one remembers fondly, and his 2011 take on The Adventures of Tintin was abominable (to this viewer, at least).
So it’s nice to sit down and find you actually enjoy The BFG, his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1982 book. Here, telling the story of a young London girl spirited away from her orphanage bed by a very large hand, Spielberg eschews cleverness and sly nods to the audience (things that made those other adaptations so exasperating) and just allows the magic to take hold.
Still, The BFG hasn’t done so well since its release last July. One wonders if it’s the title — an acronym for “Big, Friendly Giant” — that might’ve had American filmgoers scratching their heads in puzzlement and choosing Tarzan and Purge: The Election Year instead. Let’s hope Manilans figure out the title and give it a go.
Dahl’s book was dedicated to his daughter who died of measles in 1962 at age seven. Here, the young girl is played by Ruby Barnhill, a remarkable 12-year-old who makes her Sophie spirited and plucky. The screenplay (by the late Melissa Mathison, best known for scripting E.T. for Spielberg) does away with some of the book’s characters, like orphanage owner Mrs. Clonkers, focusing instead on the arrival of a 24-foot giant (voiced by Oscar winner Mark Rylance) in London’s nocturnal streets, his mission soon made clear. He is spotted by Sophie — who never dreams and often finds herself wide awake at “the witching hour” of 3 a.m. — so the giant reaches in to snatch her away. In a wonderful sequence, he imitates a tree in silhouette, a broken lamppost, and a dark alleyway to avoid detection from passing motorists before bounding north across England to a faraway land.
Spielberg’s direction mixes live action and motion-capture CGI, but closely references Quentin Blake’s watercolor illustrations (though the giant’s ears are way larger in the book). It’s this respect for the text that perhaps makes Spielberg’s kid’s movie stand up so well, where movies like Hook simply don’t.
Why has it taken Spielberg this long to return to the childlike wonder of movies like E.T.? Surely, we can appreciate his “adult” movies like Bridge of Spies (which won Rylance the Supporting Actor Oscar), the cycle of historical films like Saving Private Ryan, Munich and Lincoln, or even the sci-fi detours like Minority Report and War of the Worlds. This is a director who’s willing to tackle just about any genre that catches his fancy. Yet Tintin was a CGI mess overstuffed with action and unconvincing versions of beloved characters from the books.
The BFG doesn’t make the same mistake, limiting its story to the deepening relationship between a wide-eyed girl and her misspeaking captor in Giant Country. We soon learn that taking Sophie away was meant to prevent her from letting the world know that giants exist; the giant’s malapropisms — “human beans” and such — add to his charm. Not only that, but he’s a strict vegetarian, limiting himself to fried snozzcumbers — disgusting-looking veggies that at least allow him to brew frothscottle, a fizzy beverage that causes flatulence. (That’s a rarity in itself: fart jokes in a Disney movie.)
And as often happens in Dahl’s world, there’s a progression of scale. We learn that the BFG is merely the “runt” of Giant Country; he’s surrounded by nine other much larger giants, who do in fact enjoy eating “human beans.” One of them, Bloodbottler (voiced by Flight of the Conchords’ Jemaine Clement), soon figures out there’s a human in their midst. So returning Sophie back to her own world becomes tricky.
Credit goes to the chemistry between a young girl and a CGI version of Rylance, as they trade quips and back stories that serve to make their separation that much harder. The BFG’s lair is actually a laboratory of sorts, where he spends his days gathering dreams and placing them in bottles. The dreams are then mixed and delivered by the BFG to children throughout the world, using a dream horn. These sequences are dazzling, including a dream-catching journey in Dream Country, and a visit to a young sleeping boy who dreams of helping the President of the United States solve a major crisis.
The third act takes Sophie and BFG to Buckingham Palace, and it’s fun and delightful in all kinds of ways. Watching the giant enjoying a breakfast that consists of a mountain stack of toast and about 60 fried eggs is just a pleasure to behold. (The moment where he declares the meal “Scrumdiddlyumptious” is the only time Spielberg goes meta, tossing in a reference to Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.) Watching the BFG pour carbonated frothscottle into glasses for the Queen Mother, her Corgis and a Palace guards is, well, a gas. For once, Spielberg seems content to dial back his directorial imprint and simply let the joy of Dahl’s world shine through. In some ways, it’s similar to what Martin Scorsese pulled off in Hugo, a fantasy based on the French filmmaker Georges Méliès. Doing away with the typical hyperkinetics, we were simply immersed in Scorsese’s handmade world, created for our amusement. Scorsese doing a kid’s movie? He said he made it for his grandchildren. Perhaps Spielberg looked within again to his own inner child for The BFG.
