Bridge to Terabithia (2007)

Bridge to Terabithia 
Dir. Gabor Csupo
Premiered February 16, 2007

First two points:


1. No, this is not the Narnia-esque fantasy that the marketing suggested.

2. Yes, both the movie and its source material are way more depressing than one would first suspect.



Now that we’ve got that out of the way...

Bridge to Terabithia is based on a 1977 novel by Katharine Paterson, and is widely regarded as a classic. It’s required reading for a lot of elementary students, and I don’t know if it became less popular with time, but I had no idea this book existed until I watched Doug Walker’s review of the movie.

At the same time, the book feels very familiar to me. I was in elementary school just as high-concept YA fiction was taking over kid lit, but our classrooms and especially our teachers reserved a lot of fondness for older, low-key stuff like Beverly Cleary. And every once in a while, my grandma would rent me some terribly boring movie like The Grass Harp or Simon Birch. The film adaptation of Bridge to Terabithia is very much in that tradition of those movies, but with gratuitous CG effects.

Josh Hutcherson plays Jess, a poor kid from an anachronistically big (Catholic?) family, who’s put upon by his obnoxious sisters and school bullies (who of course have henchmen because it’s a kids’ movie). As a new school year begins, recently arrived neighbor and classmate Leslie (AnaSophia Robb) comes into Jess’ life, and they quickly bond over their shared outsider status.Together, they hang out in the woods after school, imagining it to be their own vaguely high-fantasy realm called Terabithia.

Or should I say Leslie imagines it. She’s played as a manic pixie for the under-13 crowd, with an overactive imagination and a dark side, and the filmmakers definitely emphasize that character trope, as everything she says sounds like some kind of mystical sage wisdom. I think Leslie is supposed to have a crush on Jesse but I can’t be sure. If that’s what they were going for, then they managed to nail it, because my crushes at that age were about as creepy and over-involved as hers (and Jess is realistically oblivious). For what it’s worth, Jess himself has a Glen Bishop-esque infatuation with his blandly upbeat music teacher (Zooey Deschanel).

And then Leslie dies. And it’s surprisingly heartbreaking, considering how much the movie gets wrong.

There are two main problems with this film. First of all, while the book was written in 1977, and very much reflects the childhood experience of that time, the film is set in the present day, but updates none of the story. At one point, the teacher makes an out-of-place warning about online plagiarism...in front of an ancient blackboard. The datedness of the rest of the dialogue highlights the cheesiness to an uncomfortable level. At the same time, the cinematography and editing scream “2007.” The result resembles the kind of TV movies that are too cheap to bother with period accuracy. Second, the film is constantly oversentimental. Doug Walker said that this movie feels like it was made by someone going through a midlife crisis, and he was right. And there’s a place for that, but not in a movie intended for kids, and not this much. The fantasy elements are omnipresent but never amount to more than a few special effects and the occasional big digression, with no relevance to the plot.

The only thing that really works is the friendship between the two main characters, and I was genuinely surprised at how unsanitized the depiction of childhood (Everybody knows about the little sister famously saying “God damns you to Hell” over and over, but some of the stuff Jess and Leslie do in this movie is downright cruel). But altogether, Bridge to Terabithia is an alienating film that frequently borders on self-parody. As a book I can imagine it working, but there’s no reason for this to be a movie.

Also in Theaters:

• Breach flew under the radar with a critically acclaimed depiction of FBI double-agent Robert Hanssen.

• Nicolas Cage tried and failed to make his way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Ghost Rider.
  

Additional Notes:

• After Leslie dies, one of the school bullies makes fun of her to Jess, and he unapologetically kicks his ass. Fuck yeah.
  
• Josh Hutcherson was recently cast in James Franco’s adaptation of The Disaster Artist, playing the role of Philip Haldiman. Ironically, I thought he was too young for the role at first, but based on his performance here, he’s going to make the perfect Denny.
• 
It’s been nearly four months since I started these reviews, and I haven’t even gotten through the first two months of 2007. Rest assured, I’ve actually been seeing films and writing reviews at a decent clip since Norbit, but because Bridge to Terabithia had such a long wait on Netflix, I’ve been saving them up to keep it in chonological order. So don’t be surprised if these reviews start coming out every day for a while.