The perfect family adventure
The Grace family has more than a few skeletons in the closet in
the movie
”
The Spiderwick Chronicles.
”
They’ve got a brownie, faeries galore, goblins and even
sprites.
The perfect family adventure
The Grace family has more than a few skeletons in the closet in the movie “The Spiderwick Chronicles.” They’ve got a brownie, faeries galore, goblins and even sprites.
Helen Grace (Mary-Louise Parker) moves her three children from New York City to an isolated house on the Spiderwick Estate in the country. Her aunt has long been in a mental institution and no one has lived in the house for years. She has three children, twin boys Simon and Jared (both played by Freddie Highmore) and a daughter, Mallory (Sarah Bolger), who is way into fencing.
Simon and Mallory are resigned to the move, even if it means their parents are separating. Jared, on the other hand, hates the eccentric new home, which has salt on each windowsill and a pantry full of honey, tomato sauce and oatmeal. After a fight with his sister and brother, who claims to be a pacifist, Jared explores the house on his own.
He soon stumbles upon an ancestor’s science lab and finds Arthur Spiderwick’s (David Strathairn) field guide. Viewers already know that Arthur is a biologist who could see mystical creatures. He devoted his entire life to gathering notes about the creatures and compiling them in the book. His daughter, the Graces’ Aunt Lucinda, always claimed that he had been abducted.
Jared ignores a hand-written warning on the book telling him not to open it. It seems there is a reason for the honey, the tomato sauce and the oatmeal. There is a little creature in the house, a brownie, which looks a bit like a guinea pig if it were to walk on two legs and dress in human clothes. Named Thimbletack (voiced by Martin Short), the creature was charged with keeping the book safe. When Thimbletack gets mad, he turns green and grows to twice his normal size. Honey is the only thing that will pacify him.
The movie is adapted from a series of books by author Holly Black and illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi. The screenplay is written by Karey Kirkpatrick, David Berenbaum and John Sayles.
The writers brought a fanciful world to life that unites the feuding siblings in a quest to keep the field guide and themselves safe from Mulgarath (Nick Nolte), an evil creature who wants to know all the secrets of the other creatures so he can destroy them. When Jared goes outside of the house with the book, Mulgarath sends goblins to attack his family. With the help of his siblings, Jared figures out what he needs to do to save his family.
Freddie Highmore has played many more challenging roles in his young life, including an orphan boy in “August Rush,” and the inspiration for Peter Pan in “Finding Neverland.” In “The Spiderwick Chronicles” the challenge is that he plays two characters – twin boys. The result is that in some scenes the secondary character, mostly Simon, seems to fall a little flat. Jared has the stronger personality and it seems as though Highmore put more effort into that role. It was also a little disconcerting to see both Simon and Jared on screen, knowing they were played by the same person because I kept looking for signs of the movie magic that made it happen.
The movie is predictable, and is intended for a young audience. Some of the fight scenes are a little rough for little ones what with goblins spewing green goo, but it is mostly a clean, enjoyable movie in the tradition of other children’s book series that have been converted to the big screen.
