Whizzpopperly DHALICIOUS!
Ponderous? Maybe. Meandering? A little. But with Mark Rylance as The BFG and Steven Spielberg at the helm, the children’s classic is also...
When I first saw The BFG at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, I have to confess I was underwhelmed. Yes, the visualisation of Roald Dahl’s much-loved children’s book was a pleasure to behold but, hey, this is 2016, visual-effects artists can now do just about anything and the film is directed by the great Steven Spielberg, so the fact that it would look wonderful was always a given.
But it also seemed sluggish and dramatically uneven and you could, if you were so inclined, see the whole thing as one long build-up to a joke about the Queen passing wind. I wasn’t convinced and, judging by a so-so performance at the US box office, I wasn’t alone. Is it possible that The BFG – one of the most eagerly awaited films of 2016 – is just plain NVG: not very good?
Well, having been back to see it for a second time, I can confidently tell you that the answer is no. The BFG is a gentle and, for the most part, minor-key delight that finds Spielberg, who will be 70 this year, clearly in reflective mood and yet absolutely confident in his own film- making judgments. The result is a film that doesn’t feel the need to relentlessly hit every commercial beat but takes its own meandering path, and is all the more interesting – and, indeed, unusual – for that.
Its success flows from three key decisions. First, Spielberg brought in Melissa Mathison to write the screenplay, recognising that the woman who wrote E.T. – a film about a lonely little boy befriending a small abandoned alien – would be just the right person to adapt The BFG, which at heart is the story of a lonely orphan girl befriending a lonely, much-put-upon giant.
Despite a couple of jarring Americanisms and an awful moment of Dick Van Dyke cockney – ‘You’re all bladdered, I’m callin’ the coppers’ – it was a good decision and one lent extra poignancy by the fact that Mathison died late in 2015, shortly after filming ended.
An even better – and certainly braver – decision, however, was to place so much faith in Mark Rylance. He brings such gentleness and emotional vulnerability to the title role – together with a slightly unplaceable country-bumpkin accent – that at times there is a distinct possibility of the action coming almost to a halt. Other directors might have panicked, but Spielberg has the Hollywood clout to say ‘No, this is what I want,’ and to get it.
The result isn’t always commercial but – assuming the inevitable arguments about whether a performance so heavily reliant on motion capture and visual effects qualifies – might just secure Rylance another serious award nomination or two. Don’t forget that earlier this year he won the Oscar for his supporting role in Spielberg’s Bridge Of Spies. Spielberg’s third good decision was to stick pretty faithfully with Dahl. The jumbled-up wordplay (‘I can’t be helping it if I am saying things a little squiggly’) and the schoolboy silliness (the disgusting ‘snozzcumbers’ that are the staple diet in Giant Country and the ‘whizzpopper’-inducing green bubbles of the giants’ favourite drink, ‘frobscottle’) are all there, along with a final act that suddenly leaps from the far-away, dream-catching magic of Giant Country to Buckingham Palace, the Queen and that dangerous bottle of green bubbles. It’s all pure Dahl. In Cannes, I’d found this sudden change in tone jarring and rather puerile. This time, it not only made me fall about with laughter – the way the palace courtiers courteously cope with the sudden arrival of a giant visitor is a delight – but it was moving, too. Not for the first time, I realised you have to be in the right mood for Dahl. Somewhere along the line I stopped wondering what a girl with a north England accent was doing in a London orphanage and just started enjoying the charming performance that Cheshire schoolgirl Ruby Barnhill gives as the spirited, purposeful Sophie. And somewhere else along the line I started marvelling at the marked similarities – particularly when it comes to English folklore and mythology – between The BFG
‘A gentle and minor-key delight that finds Spielberg clearly in reflective mood’
and Rylance’s great theatrical triumph as Rooster Byron in Jerusalem. Fee-fi-fo-fum indeed.
There’s a lot of fun to be had here, and children of all ages will surely enjoy the sight of jet-propelled royal corgis as they, too, encounter the unexpected after-effects of frobscottle.
But it’s the sadness and poignancy that stays with me. The BFG is bullied by the bigger giants – he’s a mere 24-footer so they call him ‘runt’ – and they ate the only other friend he ever had. No wonder he now spends a lonely life listening to ‘all the secret whisperings of the world’ through his enormous ears and collecting and distributing dreams – some good, some bad, some inducing so much guilt in the unlucky recipient that ‘Look at what you have done, there be no forgiveness’ almost counts as getting off lightly. And then Sophie comes along and things start looking up – for him, for her and, eventually, for us. Eccentric, certainly, but rather lovely, too.