Movies That Miss the Point: The Secret Garden 2020

I am a fan of scriptwriters/directors "taking liberties" with texts (sounds quite Victorian). That is, I think it is fascinating when scriptwriters/directors get inside a story and make it their own.

I get highly annoyed, however, when scriptwriters/directors adopt a text and then entirely miss the point. Why did they bother to start with that text to begin with? Why didn't they have the cleverness and wherewithal to write their own stories?

Disney's Into the Woods misses the point, but I more or less expected that. 

The most recent Secret Garden with Colin Firth (who shows up and does his notable actor thing--he isn't in the movie much) and the quite impressive Dixie Egerickx as Mary also misses the point.

It captures childhood unhappiness but it totally fails the garden.

The point of the book, of the entire idea, is that Mary enters what appears to be a drab Yorkshire landscape. She then encounters Ben Weatherstaff, the gardener, and makes a connection since they are both grumpy and vaguely misogynistic. By watching him, she figures out how to bring the garden to life (she arrives in early spring) through sheer hardworking industriousness. She finds a purpose. She brings her intelligence to the problem. Colin brings his outside-the-box thinking and Dickon brings actual knowledge and inherent talent. 

In the movie, however, when Mary discovers the garden, it is already magical, already blossoming and mysterious and unusual and filled with possibilities. It is also mostly wild and stays that way since I guess "cultivation" is a nasty word these days. 

In another context, the garden would be very cool. 

For The Secret Garden, it was a huge let-down. After Mary's first outdoor excursion, I gave up. I kept the movie running due to the acting, not the plot.

Thematically, the movie garden becomes a kind of consolation prize to unhappy children. It solves their problem. It soothes their egos. When the garden isn't fixing everything, people fix their troubles by talking or yelling therapeutic cliches at each other. 

Colin doesn't even work that hard to walk--he barely decides to do it before the movie ends. The joyful explosion of Colin out of the garden and into his father's path--the climax of the book, which never fails to astonish--never happens. Rather than being the authors of their own futures, the children revolve around the parents/parental figures within the story. They await approval rather than grabbing it for themselves. 

However lush the cinematography, the story within the movie is consequently rather pedestrian.

The fault is entirely the director's and scriptwriter's.

The kids are excellent.

Dixie Egerickx, in particular, is a marvel, a real powerhouse.  I hope to see more of her.