Review

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet

The quirky charm, visual wit and melancholy undertow of Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet translate joyously to the screen in Jean-Pierre Jeunet's The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet, a rare example of source and adaptation making a perfect match. This unlikely but involving tale of a child prodigy making his way across the United States to collect a reward for his brilliance has been designed to be delightful for parents and children alike, and is full of surprises on all levels, except, disappointingly, that of plot. The film's greatest achievement is in the way the accomplished 3-D treatment -- this is Jeunet's first foray into the format -- emerges entirely naturally, as the precise expression of a gifted child's vivid imagination.

Like Jeunet's own Amelie, which came about as close to being a 3-D film as a 2-D film can be, Spivet is about how the imagination is the best instrument for making sense of the world. The film's job is to make that imagination credible and engaging, and Jeunet succeeds beautifully with the difference that while Amelie's imagination is romantic, T.S.' is scientific.

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet

87 Cast: Kyle Catlett, Helena Bonham Carter, Callum Keith Rennie, Niamh Wilson, Jakob Davies, Judy Davis, Julian Richings, Richard Jutras, Dominique Pinon

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Rating: PG, for thematic elements, language and some reckless behavior

Running time: 105 minutes

The 10-year-old T.S. (played by Kyle Catlett: It stands for "Tecumseh Sparrow," and at times, the quirkiness feels strained) is a child prodigy whose scientific talents generally go unnoted by his teacher, Mr. Stenpock (Richard Jutras), and his family, who live on the Coppertop ranch in a hyper-real Montana (actually Alberta in Canada) of greener-than-green prairie and bluer-than-blue skies, shot in swooningly beautiful relief and detail. His mother, referred to by T.S. as Dr. Clair (Helena Bonham Carter), is a beautiful, vivacious passionate amateur etymologist. His taciturn father (Callum Keith Rennie), described as having been born a hundred years too late, is living the life of a cowboy. Frustratingly for her, T.S.' sister Gracie (Niamh Wilson) is the only noneccentric member of the household. Absent is T.S.' older brother Layton (Jakob Davies), killed in a never-discussed barn accident for which T.S. feels responsible, who casts a long shadow over the film and T.S.

T.S. is contacted by G.H. Jibsen (Judy Davis) at the Smithsonian Museum to invite him to receive a prestigious award for a perpetual motion machine he has created, thus solving at a stroke one of the great mysteries of science. Unable to collect it for obvious reasons, T.S. steals out one night to undertake the journey to Washington alone, mostly in an RV being carried on a freight train.

Spivet's first half hour is its best stretch. The viewer is bombarded by a jaw-dropping array of enjoyable 3-D effects; motes of prairie dust and scary stuffed animals are among them, but the most satisfying are those that spring from the character's minds, such as T.S.' device for dropping an egg without breaking. This has been imagined by T.S. and Jeunet with a precision which is then transferred unerringly to the screen by director of photography Thomas Hardmeier and stereographer Demetri Portelli (previously responsible for re-creating another young boy's imagination, that of Martin Scorsese's Hugo). Larsen's book is full of T.S.' sketches, and these too are reimagined there, lovingly given motion.

His oddball family itself is a subject of mystery to T.S., who understands most things but who cannot, like the viewer, comprehend how two such wildly different parents ever came together. One brief, slow-motion scene, showing that the film can tackle intimacy with the same attention as it can tackle spectacle, has the parents fleetingly brushing hands in a corridor "as though they were secretly passing seeds to one another."

It is testimony to the performance of Kyle Catlett, here making his feature debut, that their young prodigy comes over neither as insufferable nor cute. Underneath everything, humanizing T.S. is the painful sense of loss and guilt he feels at Layton's death: "Some things are just meant to die," Clair sadly reassures T.S.

Other performances are fine, with Bonham Carter making something satisfyingly complex out of Clair, a feminist who's ultimately frustrated at having to be a mother. But the one-note Jibsen comes increasingly to the fore toward the end of the film, and Davis has to camp it up enormously to try and wring something extra out of that note.

With Spivet, Jeunet supplies an outsider's vision of America that is more critical than celebratory, and there's a fair amount of myth-puncturing on display -- among other targets, we find the suffocating weight of cowboy culture, the imagination-stifling conservatism of its institutions and, more obviously and clumsily, the dangerous distortions of reality TV, a filmic subject on which an embargo should surely now be placed. Luckily, Jeunet and Laurant have enough depth, wit and brio to import new life into such stale subjects.

MovieStyle on 07/31/2015

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