OUT OF A HAT
Peter Rabbit remake avoids pratfalls
Revisiting a classic of children’s lit’ more than 100 years after it was published is an exercise fraught with traps.
Stay too close to the watercoloured whimsy of the originals and today’s kids will be suing you next decade for mental abuse and 95 minutes of their lives they will never get back. But, go too far the other way and lose the essential charm of the source material, and you’ll make no friends at all. Kids can spot inauthenticity a mile off and the parents will hate you regardless.
So the makers of this Peter Rabbit have a tough task. And I reckon they’ve come up with a smart – not perfect – solution.
Director Will Gluck (Easy A) and co-writer Rob Lieber (The Goldbergs) have brought Peter and co into the 21st century, but left the setting more-or-less intact. We are in a tiny, wooded slice of rural England, apparently untouched since 1901 when Beatrix Potter first published the original book.
Old Mcgregor (an unrecognisable Sam Neill) is still tending his beloved garden and waging war against the rabbits, who would have their way with his radishes given half a chance. Peter and his three sisters now live under the aegis of an artist named ‘‘Bea’’ (Rose Byrne, perfect), in a burrow within the roots of an old oak.
When Mcgregor departs early in the first act, the 21st century arrives in the shape of his nephew (Domhnall Gleeson), a toy department manager at Harrods, who plans to sell up and leg it back to London asap. And then he meets Bea...
Peter and whanau try to get at Mcgregor’s veges and Mcgregor fights back. Complicating matters is the blossoming romance between young Mcgregor and Bea, and the unexpected jealousy the orphaned Peter feels over this. (In this Peter Rabbit, both mum and dad have already met their maker under a layer of old Mcgregor’s pastry.)
Peter Rabbit is pitched variously as a very welcome, overdue and gleefully anarchic rethinking of the whole anthropomorphic animal genre (much as Potter’s original books were in 1901), and partly as an aggravating and vaguely tone-deaf American re-write of a much-loved Brit classic. I sat alternately irritated by the crassness, yet grudgingly admiring of the energy and smarts with which it has been done.
So while allegedly grown-up Graeme may have winced at the umpteenth time Gleeson was shot across the room by a violent electrocution, seven-year-old Graeme would probably have been laughing.
Peter Rabbit walks a very fine line between desecration and veneration of the source. It sure ain’t your nana’s Potter. But neither is it done without wit, intelligence and respect.