The Spiderwick Chronicles

February 14, 2008

How refreshing: The Spiderwick Chronicles is an adaptation of a fantasy adventure novel that’s 90 minutes long, looks unflinchingly at divorce, features a parent active in the goings-on of her children’s lives, and exposes the viewer to its fantastic elements gracefully, without introducing a lot of info dumps or characters who exist solely to give exposition.

It’s also a hell of a lot of fun, and the relatively rote, by-the-numbers fantasy stylings of The Golden Compass or the latter Lord of the Rings movies are nowhere to be found. The Spiderwick Chronicles is genuinely original in its imaginings, to the point of fascination. It’s also nice to see David Strathairn, the actor who gave us a career-defining performance as Edward R. Murrow, shout lines like “you must protect the book from the ogre!”

The Spiderwick Chronicles is about the Grace family, mother Helen (Mary-Louise Parker, always a welcome sight), eldest child Mallory (Sarah Bolger), and twins Simon and Jared (Freddie Highmore, playing the former as the bookworm and the latter as the rebellious one). A messy separation between Helen and the largely unseen Richard (Andrew McCarty) sees her and the kids moving out to the country and into her long-gone great-uncle Arthur Spiderwick’s (Strathairn) estate. The tension in the unhappy clan is painted in quick, broad strokes: Mallory tries to support her mother, Simon sits behind a wall of trivia, and Jared simply refuses to interact with Helen. Helen, for her part, just wants everything to work out… because what alternative does she have?

Within a few hours of moving in, Jared suspects something else lives in the house: something small, and intelligent. It’s not long before he stumbles into the attic study of Spiderwick, and finds a hidden book with a warning never to open or read it, lest the reader’s life change forever. If you can think of a better way to get a kid to crack open a book than that, please let me know.

The truth of the book becomes quickly apparent to Jared, and soon after to his siblings. The forest surrounding the house is filled with fairies, boggarts, red caps, sylphs and goblins. Many are benign, save for the worst of them all: the ogre Mulgarath (voice of Nick Nolte). Mulgarath wants the Spiderwick book, sort of a fairy bestiary, for the power it would give him over all fairy-kind. Spiderwick set up several defenses around the house, but they aren’t infallible, and the kids (and soon Helen as well) have to fend for themselves.

What struck me so much about The Spiderwick Chronicles is how small it is. This is not a bad thing. There are hints that Mulgarath’s acquiring the Spiderwick book would be bad news for the entire world, but on the whole the movie’s action takes place in the span of about two days, spread out over maybe 500 yards of geography, barring one memorable trip to a fairy glade.

That relative smallness in scope is welcome. I can see now this was unfair of me, but I walked into the movie having already lumped it in with LOTR, The Golden Compass, The Chronicles of Narnia, and others like them: A whole lot of traveling, a whole lot of learning new names, and the disappointing feeling that the 3 hours of endless CGI we’d just seen was nothing more than the prologue for a franchise, no doubt one featuring 6 or 9 more hours of endless CGI.

But The Spiderwick Chronicles is in many ways the antithesis of the “epic fantasy” bloat. It’s not epic, for one. Its characters are drawn on a human scale and occupied by charismatic actors. Its fantasy conceits are little-explored by other movies on the big screen. It’s also intense, especially in the ending battles with Mulgarath – perhaps a bit too intense for littler kids. Anyone older should have no problem; should, in fact, find themselves thrilled. I’m pleased to say I was just as thrilled, and charmed, as any ‘tweener in the audience.