Cast:
- Freddie Highmore ... Jared Grace/Simon Grace
- Mary-Louise Parker ... Helen Grace
- Nick Nolte ... Mulgarath
- Sarah Bolger ... Mallory Grace
- Andrew McCarthy ... Richard
- Joan Plowright ... Aunt Lucinda
- David Strathairn ... Arthur Spiderwick
- Seth Rogen ... Hogsqueal (voice)
- Martin Short ... Thimbletack
Directed by Mark Waters (The House of Yes, Requiem for a Dream, Just Like Heaven). Screenplay by Karey Kirkpatrick (Chicken Run, Charlotte's Web), David Berenbaum (Elf, Zoom), and John Sayles (Sunshine state, Casa de los Babys). Based on the books by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black.
A Hidden World
The premise of The Spiderwick Chronicles is one close to every child (and many a grown-up): that the boring old world around us has hidden secrets waiting to be explored by someone clever and intrepid enough to find them. This idea holds enough innate fascination that any story, from The Faerie Queene to Harry Potter to Stardust, has a leg up on yarns spun around faraway worlds and remote dimensions.
In The Spiderwick Chronicles, a young boy named Jared is dealing badly with his parents' separation and moving with his mother, sister Mallory, and straightlaced twin brother Simon to a huge, tumbledown in the middle of nowhere, when he discovers a mysterious, sealed book with a warning attached not to open it. It's a field guide to the hidden world around them, a densely populated world of goblins, fairies, and other fantastic creatures of all sorts. It's a trove of secrets, and opening the book (as Jared, of course, does) alerts the one creature that wants to find it and its collected secrets for evil: Mulgarath the ogre.
When goblins in Mulgarath's service mistakenly kidnap Simon, Jared must use his newfound knowledge to rescue his brother and protect his family, seeking help along the way from their supposedly crazy aunt Luncinda and ultimately Arthur Spiderwick himself, the man who created the book eighty years before before vanishing into the mysterious woods forever.
Fast-Paced Fantasy
After the turgid, isolated set pieces of The Golden Compass, The Spiderwick Chronicles is a delight: it moves swiftly and cleanly through its plot, unencumbered by vast attention to special effects, which are excellent and sufficient to move the story forward without getting in the way. It's hardly an epic -- the story involved is fairly simple, which is fine if it's told engagingly. Spiderwick brings you into the old Spiderwick house and exposes you to its secrets along with the children, allowing you to feel the same mix of exhilaration and trepidation and a chance to see the world in a new way.
A story like Spiderwick relies heavily on two things: the special effects being convincing without being distracting, which they generally are (though many of the creatures, especially the goblins, have a deliberate air of caricature about them), and on the performances of the children. Here Freddie Highmore, last seen in the excruciatingly winsome August Rush, comes close to living up to the promise he displayed in Finding Neverland. Here he plays both twins, and while the age-old rebel/conformist twin dynamic is replayed here, it's used primarily to introduce us to the brothers and then allowed to retreat into the background. Simon and Jared, in other words, are freed to act according to the situation in the context of their personalities without being bound by rigid twin characterization, and between Freddie and the director, Mark Waters, they're able to provide two different and interesting characters.
Fun but Conventional
To review Mark Waters's resume is to observe the classic Hollywood story of an iconoclastic indie director who buys into the Hollywood scene and becomes thoroughly mainstream. He started out with House of Yes, and his drug phantasmagoria Requiem for a Dream was one of the most disturbing films I've seen. But once he became Hollywood he started doing films like Just Like Heaven -- lyrical, yes, but utterly conventional. In Spiderwick I looked in vain for any sign of the indie rebel, but while this film is lots of fun it doesn't have the slightest element of subversion or departure from the commercial.
The cinematography, evoking lush woods and a rambling dust-strewn mansion, is superb, and the dialog is fine. The supporting performances are generally good but don't rise above the material: Mary-Louise Parker plays the frazzled mom who comes around just in time exactly as expected, and the remaining live action performances feel like cameos: Joan Plowright has a scene where she explains the backstory, and David Strathairn looks dazed and confused in essentially three scenes as Spiderwick. Kudos should go to Andrew McCarthy's agent, who got him star billing for a tiny one-minute appearance (which is a red herring anyway). Spiderwick does manage to boast Martin Short's most tolerable and understated (!) performance in years, as Thimbletack.
Spiderwick won't change the world, but it's ultimately a fun romp through a fantastical countryside, and that's all it really needs or wants to be.
