HAS TIM BURTON LOST THE PLOT?
You’ll need a PhD in nonsense to follow this story, but you might just love it
Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children (12A) Verdict: Peculiar in more ways than one
PECulIAr is an adjective that could be applied to any of Tim Burton’s films but here’s one that helpfully has it in the title, the director’s energetically loopy, impressively starry adaptation of the best-selling 2011 novel by ransom riggs.
The book was aimed at ‘young adults’, but it’s harder to identify the film’s target audience. The 12A certificate suggests that it’s directed squarely at children, but it contains some deeply unsettling if not downright alarming images, and besides, any child who hasn’t read the book, or any grown-up for that matter, will find great swathes of the plot all but unfathomable.
You’ll need a PhD in nonsense to understand exactly what is going on.
Here’s my own best guess. Jake (Asa Butterfield) is a Florida teenager whose closest relationship is with his grandpa Abe (Terence Stamp, as wooden as ever, but it’s still a pleasure to see those cheekbones).
When Jake finds Abe about to die, following some sort of attack in which his eyes were plucked out, the old man declares there’s something he should have told him years before. And how.
For it turns out that Jake is a ‘Peculiar’, just as Abe was, meaning a child with strange or supernatural gifts.
Jake has been raised listening to Abe’s bedtime stories, about how he escaped from Poland to Britain before World War II and lived with other uniquely gifted children in a home on an island just off the Welsh coast.
The home was run by the eccentric, pipe-smoking Miss Peregrine (Eva Green), who had the ability to metamorphose into a falcon.
It all sounds like outlandish make-believe, yet Abe has a collection of faded photographs to back up his stories. Jake believes them, fervently. Jake’s father (Chris O’Dowd), convinced that his son has ‘mental health issues’, takes him to see a psychotherapist (Allison Janney). She recommends that father and son should travel together to the Welsh island, so that Jake might learn to separate fact and fantasy. It should be a bonding experience, too, except that Jake’s dad is too bored and selfabsorbed to bond, leaving Jake alone to explore the island, and indeed to stumble back into 1943, where he finds Miss Peregrine’s school and is gradually accepted into the fold. He learns what the other children’s talents are before he knows his own, with invisibility and uncommon strength merely the most prosaic of them. One girl can start fires with her fingertips, another has a monster’s mouth in the back of her neck. Jake’s ‘special’ friend is Emma (Ella Purnell), who is lighter than air but can also manipulate it in strange ways.
Needless to say, Burton has great fun with these peculiarities, all of which, sooner or later, are deployed in the service of the plot.
Ah, the plot. Just when you think you have its number, real weirdness sets in. Miss Peregrine is an ‘ymbrine’, meaning not just that she can take the form of a bird, but also that she can create a time loop, picking a particular day — in this case September 3, 1943 — which she and the children live over and over.
THAT night, a German bomb falls on the school, but she is able to stop it seconds before it lands, and wind back to the start of the day. In the meantime, a set of baddies known as the Hollows, and led by the dastardly, shape-shifting Barron (Samuel L. Jackson), are in pursuit of immortality, with Miss Peregrine and her proteges standing in their way. This is when Jake discovers his own peculiarity, leading to a bonkers denouement on Blackpool prom, of all places.
Judi Dench and Rupert Everett add further A-list heft to the supporting cast, and the screenplay is by Jane Goldman, whose marriage to Jonathan Ross has become the least interesting thing about her.
She has now written two X-Men films, and actually brings something of the X-Men vibe to this, though it plainly owes more to Harry Potter than anything else.
What she fails to do is simplify it. The last thing Burton needs, with his fondness for dark surrealism, is a labyrinthine story to tell.
But the special effects are great, an underwater scene is superbly realised, and there are probably more reasons to see the film than not. Just don’t expect to understand it.