By Tricia Olszewski
Wonder, inspiration, friendships forged, and lessons learned—in a children’s movie, these positive elements are tough to project without ruining a parent’s lunch. The now-tired approach that Disney and its imitators have taken, of course, is to fill an otherwise syrupy script with rapid-fire pop-culture references that only grown-ups will understand. Wisecracking animals have been popular, too. Really, how else to grab the tykes and entertain the adults if it doesn’t involve Robin Williams and a couple of stealthily racy jokes?
Well, see 2005’s excellent Zathura. (No one else did.) And Bridge to Terabithia, a nonmangled interpretation of Katherine Paterson’s 1978 tween novel. Both movies are smart, imaginative, thoughtful, and fun; instead of throwing in a barrage of jokes aimed toward different demographics, Zathura and Terabithia simply ace their “whoa, cool!” factor in a way that makes the more mature audience members feel like kids again.
The two even share a star. Here Josh Hutcherson, the big brother in Zathura, plays Jess, a fifth-grader from a large working-class family who’s good at running and drawing, on the quiet side, and officially stamped an outsider when a new classmate named Leslie (AnnaSophia Robb) beats him in a race. Jess retreats into his art, as well as the music class taught by Ms. Edmonds (Zooey Deschanel), a young, pretty, free-thinking type who teaches the group songs such as Steve Earle’s “Someday.” (“I wanna know what’s over that rainbow/I’m gonna get out of here someday,” Jess sings, smiling for once, as if the song were written just for him.) Leslie, who just moved into the rural area, proves to be an outcast herself, getting dirty looks when the teacher singles out her well-written essay and laughed at when she says her New Age–ish parents don’t own a television. The misfits soon become close, though, and find a lonely patch of woods that’s a ripe setting for a fantasy world they call Terabithia.
The friends’ escapist realm, in which they envision “hairy vultures,” giant trolls, and dragonfly soldiers, is integral to the story. Accessible only by a rope that swings over a creek, the area lets the kids get to know each other and indulge their creative talents apart from bullying eyes and family problems, and it also figures into the story’s bittersweet ending. (Be forewarned: There’s no sugarcoat on the book’s plot.) First-time feature director Gabor Csupo doesn’t use the imagination-borne Terabithia as an excuse to drown the film in CG. Instead, there are flashes of fancy throughout: bubbles coming out of Leslie’s mouth as Jess listens to her story about scuba diving, a massive tree briefly morphing into a monster, the handmade bridge of the title becoming gilded when Jess introduces his little sister, May Belle (an adorable Bailee Madison), to his secret place.
The script—by Jeff Stockwell and David Paterson, Katherine Paterson’s son—also mostly delivers the book’s messages with a light touch. (The exception is Jess’ tough dad, Jack [Robert Patrick], who frequently admonishes him to “get his head out of the clouds and do as I say.”) The power of friendship is an obvious theme here, but the more exciting one is the time a kid’s world starts to open up: All Jess had known is being mocked by other students, watching his parents struggle to pay bills, and being overshadowed by his four sisters. It’s heartwarming to see Leslie bring out Jess’ sense of playfulness and creativity. And it’s thrilling to hear Ms. Edmonds (the kind of teacher every student should be lucky to encounter even once) speculate, as she and Jess are looking at a painting, whether the artist started drawing in notebooks like Jess: “Da Vinci did,” she casually adds.
Hutcherson, as the contemplative Jess, perfects the brood of a future singer-songwriter; he also can be subtle, as his character hesitantly lets himself believe in and have fun with Leslie’s games. And Robb, with a golden bob and wide eyes, is a strong, joyful presence, her prettiness and command of the screen a result not of Hollywood’s usual aww-how-cuteness, but from her capture of the character’s sparkle. Yes, there is a scene or two whose cries of “Wonder! Wonder!” are a bit too loud, but the script nicely balances those with humor that’s organic instead of impossibly clever. It’s one of Jess’ realizations, after all: “What’s so great about being serious all the time, anyway?”
Writer-director Daniel Burman attempts subtlety in the coming-of-middle-age drama Family Law, but the result is a story devoid of development and emotion. The film, set in Argentina, focuses on Ariel Perelman (Daniel Hendler), a young attorney and legal-ethics professor with a wife, a son, and a father to whom he isn’t especially close. Dad (Arturo Goetz) is also a lawyer, albeit a smooth, glad-handing one with a successful private practice and friends wherever he goes, which makes the distance between him and Ariel especially unfortunate.
Ariel begins to ruminate on their relationship and the kind of father he’s shaping up to be to his cute, precocious toddler, Gastón (Eloy Burman). It’s not promising: Ariel’s not terribly generous with his affection, is willing to allow a construction worker to watch the kid instead of spending the day with him, and resents that the Swiss school Gastón attends encourages frequent parental participation in activities. He scoffs when his wife, at-home Pilates instructor Sandra (Julieta Díaz), reminds him that Gastón’s birthday is coming up, even though he just forgot his father’s 65th. He calls Dad “Perelman.”
Burman is sometimes called the Latin American Woody Allen, but the amount of dialogue in Family Law’s script is equal to, give or take, approximately two scenes out of any Allen flick. Sure, there’s a ton of introspection going on, but it’s signaled by long takes trained on Hendler’s furrowed brow rather than logorrhea. The larger problem, though, is that there’s little background to inform Ariel’s melancholy stares. Through the character’s voiceover, we get a description of the always-grinning Perelman, including his precise schedule and methods of connecting with his clients. (A close-up of his legs as he’s springing down some steps is a nice touch.) Ariel tells us that he met his wife in one of his classes, which he seems to have more enthusiasm for than his eventual family. And as lawyers go, he’s one of the good guys, working for the state and scornful of attorneys such as Perelman who may approach a case without the truth necessarily in mind.
But there’s no family history, no sense of Ariel’s upbringing, no before-and-after context to show how marriage and parenthood may have changed him. What Burman offers, then, is episodic shots of handsome characters’ everyday lives, building up to a dramatic turn that, because it’s so underplayed, misses the drama. Ariel is, at least, a dryly funny guy—for instance, he objects to going to Gastón’s parents-and-kids joint swimming lesson by complaining that he’ll “have to hold hands with other hairy men.” But Family Law is never more than mildly amusing, with a short closing-chapter speech by Ariel that nicely sums up what the film should have demonstrated all along: It’s OK for fathers and sons to be different, and the younger generations shouldn’t be pushed to copy their elders. Like Ariel’s improving intimacy with his own dad, though, the message comes too late.