Sweet and funny, Spielberg’s BFG is a delight for the whole family
ROALD Dahl and Steven Spielberg are not necessarily a match made in cinematic heaven. Dahl never sugarcoated his stories for children, whereas ‘sentimentality’ might as well be Spielberg’s middle name.
But the good news is that the celebrated director has made a wonderful job of The BFG, helped immeasurably by his leading man. Mark Rylance is already a metaphorical giant of stage and screen, and now he rises to the challenge literally as well.
He is an absolute delight as Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant; imagine, if you possibly can, an oversized version of the humble gardener played by Paul Whitehouse in The Fast Show’s Ted and Ralph sketches, with the convoluted speech patterns of John Prescott on a really bad day. He’s cherishably sweet and funny.
Rylance’s first collaboration with Spielberg yielded an Oscar. That was last year’s Bridge Of Spies – or Fridge Of Flies, as the BFG might say.
Well this performance is every bit as memorable, however much it owes to the people in the bells-and-whistles department, who have worked marvels with motion-capture technology. And hats off too to young Ruby Barnhill, an 11-year-old from Cheshire in her first movie role, who is splendid as Sophie, the orphan who befriends the BFG.
She’s as good a foil as Henry Thomas’s Elliott was to ET in Spielberg’s 1982 classic, and the parallel is reinforced by a script from ET screenwriter Melissa Mathison, Harrison Ford’s exwife, who sadly died last November. This is a worthy swansong.
For those unfamiliar with Dahl’s book, the story whisks Sophie off to Giant Country after she looks out the orphanage window in the middle of the night and spots the BFG delivering dreams to boys and girls.
There she finds that he is bullied by even bigger giants, who resent his refusal to eat human beings, and will certainly gobble her up ‘like strawbuncles and cream’ if they find her.
So Sophie hatches a plan to capture them, which involves appealing to the Queen of England, beautifully played by Penelope Wilton in a riotously funny scene at Buckingham Palace.
The image of three royal corgis farting along with the Queen was a personal highlight of the 2016 Cannes Film Festival, where The BFG was lavishly unveiled on Saturday night.
Indeed, Spielberg is at his most playful throughout, beguilingly mixing up the period, with a Dickensian London full of Sixties cars, and the Queen referring to her friends ‘Ronnie and Nancy’, but also to ‘Boris’.
Not everyone in the Cannes audience was as charmed as I was, but I’ll be amazed if this film isn’t a resounding summer-holiday hit in the UK.
It really does offer a huge treat for the whole family – with the caveat that very young children might well be scared out of their wits by some of the more ‘murderful’ giants.
Seeing it in France also came with an unexpected bonus. It was highly entertaining following the valiant but entirely unsuccessful efforts of the sub-titles to translate ‘a great rumpledumpus’ and a ‘yucky-mucky end’.
The BFG opens on July 22