‘The Secret Garden’ comes up roses on film — yet again
It’s probably not possible to make a bad movie out of “The Secret Garden.”
While I can’t vouch for the lost silent feature adapted from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s beloved 1911 children’s novel, the 1949 Hollywood version starring Margaret O’Brien and Dean Stockwell was beautifully cinematic, its drab blackandwhite “real world” parts interspersed with Technicolor garden scenes. Agnieszka Holland’s realist but equally gorgeous 1993 feature is quite rightly cherished by the generation that grew up on it.
Now its 2020 iteration, adapted by Jack Thorne (“Wonder,” HBO’s “His Dark Materials”) and directed by Marc Munden, may veer too far from the book with its 1947 setting and visualized fantasy elements that previous versions just hinted at (they even throw in a dog), but it’s a bit pointless to worry about commercial touches damaging the story’s heart. The core concept, which links emotional and physical regeneration with the reappearance of beauty, is too robust for a few modern touches to do it any harm.
Those changes can be viewed as enhancements, too. While it’s still cholera that takes spoiled tween Mary Lennox’s parents away from her in India, their deaths are now set against the wider tragedy of the subcontinent’s bloody, preindependence partition. When she’s sent to live at her uncle’s Yorkshire estate, Misselthwaite Manor is not only depressed by the absence of her late Aunt Lilia, but also haunted by the pain of soldiers who were treated there when it was requisitioned for a hospital during World War II.
Dixie Egerickx (seen in “The Little Stranger” and the justreleased “Summerland”) plays Mary with a skillful balance of privileged brattiness, suppressed trauma and barrelahead British spunk. Much of the movie is seen from her point of view. That helps justify the moments when murals morph into moving tableaux, memories of her lush if bittersweet colonial home replace the mansion’s foreboding interiors, and the walledoff garden she eventually discovers comes to tastefully vibrant, CGenhanced life or withers, depending on her moods — or the moods of her companions.
Edan Hayhurst modulates hysteria pretty well as Mary’s bedridden cousin Colin, and Amir Wilson brings an intriguing hint of menace to her goodwithanimals partner in adventure, Dickon.
Unfortunately, the movie’s adults are fairly onenote. Colin Firth riffs on angry, befuddled anguish as mysterious Uncle Archibald, but doesn’t dig too deep. Julie Walters’ head housekeeper Mrs. Medlock is a strict martinet, as you’d expect. And Isis Davis is 99% nice as Mary’s maid and Dickon’s sister, Martha. Adults may be the real problem throughout the story, but I doubt such underwritten roles were intentional.
Although those digital additions certainly catch the eye, this production was primarily shot naturally, at some of England and Wales’ most beautiful gardens. It’s almost a tourist’s dream of the British countryside that Munden — an awardwinning TV director whose background includes assisting such art house giants as Terence Davies, Derek Jarman and Mike Leigh — successfully convinces us exists in one coherent, magical realist location.
Things get quite Gothic in the film’s final stretch, with genre addons that “Garden” purists may also find distasteful. The extra melodrama can feel unnecessary. However, it leads to moments of liferestoring beauty (core theme here again) and love, which while implicit in Burnett’s conception can always use extra emphasis — especially now, for all of us children wondering where our place in the world may be.