The Spiderwick Chronicles is a superb fantasy movie that towers over its Narnian and Dark Materialed rivals despite, and possibly because of its non-epic, almost domestic scale. Although ostensibly for children, the filmmakers made a laudable decision to allow the threats to be very, very real, to be genuinely scary, and to avoid easy, mawkish endings. As one would expect, the heroes win and the villains lose, but winning does not make all the heroes’ problems go away. In fact, it is my great pleasure to report that the classic fairytale ending of “they all lived happily ever after” is not even remotely applicable.

The performances throughout are spot-on. The script is tight with just the right amount of flourish to spark up the necessary slower, building scenes. It speaks volumes that the producers invited John Sayles to the screenwriting team. Sayles, for those who don’t know, is widely regarded as one of the great American filmmakers of the 1970s. He specialises in small-scale, low-budget independent movies (if I could recommend one of his films, check out Lone Star) and his skill in drawing big character out of small dialogue is second to none. Probably Sayles joined Spiderwick on the recommendation of his frequent collaborator David Strathairn (who plays Arthur Spiderwick), but the fact that the producers took him on shows that they were serious about making a good film with solid characterisation and were not willing to fob off the audience just because they are children and watching a fantasy film. And Spiderwick has a line that is destined to be quoted everywhere.

Vengeance or death! … Hopefully vengeance.

Quibbles: my only major reservation is the disservice the script does to the older sister in the movie. She starts as an intelligent young woman with moxie, but as her younger brother becomes more and more self-assured, she becomes less and less. It’s almost as if her brother’s rise is counterweighted by her own diminution. By the end of the film she is looking to her brother with big puppy eyes for her next instruction.

I am aware that the film has considerable divergences from its source books. For instance, the children in the book are shifted five or six years older than in the books. But not having read the books I can’t comment on the overall effect of these changes for good or bad.

I have a bigger quibble–although not with the movie itself but rather with the fantasy genre as a whole. The tropes of Spiderwick are drawn straight from the folklore of Europe and yet it is set in New England, USA. It seems myopically ahistorical to me to assume that brownies and sylphs and ogres have lived in America the whole time. Perhaps they stowed away on the westward ships–in which case there is a great idea to be had in the clash between the invading European mythology and the Native American. Who wouldn’t want to read about Puck hunting Coyote in the Columbia River Plateau after Chief Joseph’s surrender to take Coyote’s place as the trickster of the New World?

Tags: chronicles, fantasy, folk, review, spiderwick, spiderwick chronicles