Upfront; I am not a Roald Dahl fan. Some of his work strikes me as
misogynist, much of it seems to
celebrate hatred and violence, and may even be anti-Semetic. Of course his word play was brilliant, and
he could see into the mind of childhood.
But children can have nasty minds
too, and I think he sometimes celebrated that nastiness.
However.
I do love The BFG. It may not justify
the rest of his output, but it is his most popular book, and richly deserves to
be.
I also love many of Spielberg’s movies,
from E.T. to Munich, Tintin to Bridge of Spies,
Hook
to Close Encounters, AI to Catch Me If You Can. (Let’s just pause for a moment to consider his
uniquely enormous genre and tonal range,
adding your own poles-apart-examples if you like.)
So; you will not be surprised to learn that
I really enjoyed Spielberg’s film of The BFG.
Of course I admire the technical brilliance
his team bring to the task, aided to an
enormous extent by Mark Rylance’s performance as he provided the voice, the bodily
movement and the facial expressions fed into the computer for digitization to
create the on-screen BFG. This seems to
be almost ‘essence of Rylance’, an amplification and distillation of his
warmth, wisdom, humour, inventiveness, grace and humanity. I have long thought that Andy Serkis
should have an Oscar or BAFTA category created for his digital work, but now at
last he has a rival.
The storyline is thin, and the late
lamented Melissa Mathison resisted – or was discouraged by the Dahl foundation
from giving in to- the temptation to add to it. The cast of characters is limited, and many
of them are not really developed characters.
But there are two real in-depth people, the eight year old orphan Sophie (Ruby Barnhill)
and the BFG, and they are what the whole film is about. The other - truly gigantic - giants, Human-Bean
Eaters, the magnificent fart jokes, even
the dream-jars and the enchanting dream lake and tree so beautifully created by
Janusz Kaminski, Spielberg’s go-to cinematographer, do not overwhelm the
central relationship. They pay detailed attention to each
other. They care for each other, they tell each other stories. At times they mother and father each other. They
befriend and protect each other. They
matter, to each other, and (if we will let them) to us. As Mark Zoller Seitz says on the Roger Ebert
site, this is a kind-souled movie
about kind souls. It is deeply
humane, and that works for adults as much as for children.
Please do not dismiss this as a children’s
movie and miss seeing it.
