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I suppose I shouldn’t blame a film for being utterly different from what the trailers say it is.
But jaw-droppingly false advertising happens so often nowadays, I’m thinking of starting a consumer revolt.
It is incumbent on a movie review, however, to be a public service, so let me alert parents and kids–at least the ones who didn’t read Katherine Paterson’s moving Newbery Award-winning book in school–that “Bridge to Terabithia” is not “The Chronicles Of Narnia”.
This, despite a series of ads that takes a few seconds of CGI “imagination scenes” from the movie and implies that they are the entire story.
Based on these images of giants, mutant terror-birds and body-armour-wearing giant squirrels, children–and particularly young boys, who are awkward at handling feelings at the best of times–might end up emotionally sucker-punched by a movie about joyous pre-teen frendship and aching loss.
Given this is a Disney movie, I wonder how they’d sell their all-time weepie “Old Yeller” today: “In a world of wolves run rampant, where homesteaders struggle to feed their young’uns, one dog led the battle!”
But I digress.
Prewarned, “Bridge to Terabithia” is a decent effort at recreating the relationship between two bullied pre-teens–a girl with a penchant for creating stories, and a boy with a brilliant hand at drawing–who create their own imaginary refuge from the world.
The movie pulls no punches from the harder aspects of the book, particularly the central tragedy that makes “Bridge to Terabithia” the tremendously sad, albeit redeeming, movie it is.
Jess (Josh Hutcherson) and new girl Leslie (Anna Sophia Robb, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s” Violet Beauregard) take different approaches to the bullying of class sadists Scott (Cameron Wakefield), Gary (Elliott Lawless) and bathroom extortionist Janice (Lauren Clinton).
Jess withdraws while wide-eyed Leslie is right in their faces. (What they have in common is that they’re the fastest two kids in the school.)
Somehow, the combination meshes as the two discover they’re neighbors, and Leslie begins spinning a yarn based on the woods beyond the creek that runs by their homes.
There they hole up in an abandoned treehouse that becomes their fortress as the aforementioned squirrels “reveal” themselves to be agents of the Dark Master, all of whose minions are forest creatures who morph through the power of imagination.
As mentioned, all of this represents but a few minutes of FX in the entire movie.
It’s mere glitz that giftwraps Jess and Leslie’s relationship, a freewheeling friendship that provides Jess solace from his homelife with his joyless father (Robert Patrick, reprising his spirit-killing dad vibe from “Walk the Line”).
Complicating the chemistry is a hot, wide-eyed music teacher (Zooey Deschanel) who leads the class in guitar sing-a-long to songs such as “Why Can’t We Be Friends,” and who becomes the object of Jess’ first crush.
Hutcherson and Robb are magnetic child actors (she seems to have been produced in the same genetics lab that produced Dakota Fanning), and in some ways this is a distraction.
Kids that good-looking, who are also top athletes, are unlikely to be class pariahs.
Still, their charm carries the story through, and makes that final, tragic half-hour all the more difficult viewing if you’re intent on keeping a stiff upper lip.
-Steve McDonald
