What’s It About
A modern family relocates to the countryside, where the children discover a magical tree with eccentric residents. They are transported to fantastical lands, where they rekindle their family bond through adventures.
MOVIESinMO REVIEW
The Thompson family cannot put their phones down, and that is the real problem “The Magic Faraway Tree” wants to fix. Directed by Ben Gregor and written by Simon Farnaby, this new film pulls from Enid Blyton’s classic books and turns them into a bright, busy trip about a family that has to relearn how to be a family. The movie means well and looks great doing it, but it never quite finds the heart to match its colors. Tim (Andrew Garfield) and Polly (Claire Foy) Thompson reside in a city with their three children Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), Joe (Phoenix Laroche), and Fran (Billie Gadsdon). Polly is an engineer and designs a smart fridge that talks like Judi Dench. When Polly found out the fridge has a hidden camera, she quits her job immediately. This one act of hers leads the family to a totally new place in their lives. Tim finds an old book of dreams and chooses a plan to move to the countryside and start a business based on making tomato sauce. The children are not hyped to go anywhere, but no one asks them about their feelings. The new home turns out to be a run-down barn with no power and no Wi-Fi, so the kids actually have to go outside. Fran, the quiet one who would rather read than talk, wanders into the woods and meets a fairy named Silky (Nicola Coughlan). Silky leads her up a massive tree that opens into a different magical land every single day, and soon Joe and Beth tag along too. This is where the movie should take off, and for a while, it does. The tree is full of rare and vibrant creatures. Moonface (Nonso Anozie) is the owner and guardian of the place, which has one and only rule: no humans allowed, since watching children grow and lose faith in magic makes his heart ache. It’s probably the most emotional idea in the entire film, and Anozie gives a nice performance. But unfortunately, the script fails to give him enough time to embrace this sentiment. Moonface doesn’t have many scenes and has to enforce one rule without having a full character arc. This is where the movie shows its biggest flaw.Giving an actor a role that has an emotional background is not the same as giving him a chance to act on this background. Anozie deserves a better chance to act out this feeling in the film instead of just letting it go. All the other characters in the tree cause chaos. Dame Washalot (played by Jessica Gunning) spends her time cleaning things, Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns) makes a racket like a clanging piece of metal, and Angry Pixie (Hiran Abeysekera) and Mr. Wazisname (Oliver Chris) mainly hang around. The only surprise is the character of the Great Know-All, who appears with three different actors playing his role, sounds good from the point of view, but turns out to be just a gimmick. Funny enough, most of the characters don’t go beyond their only scene or appearance, so in the end, it’s only their costumes that tell what they are about. The film’s villain suffers the worst from this problem. Dame Snap (Rebecca Ferguson) rules over a cold, school-like land, and the story sets her up as the one force that could actually threaten the family’s happy ending. Instead, she barely appears. Ferguson has carried far bigger and darker roles than this, and here she gets almost nothing to work with. A movie about a family learning to fight for each other needed a villain who felt like a real threat, not a name mentioned more often than she is seen. Once back on terra firma, it becomes more certain. Garfield and Foy display great on-screen chemistry as the two parents pursuing an old dream that they had long forgotten about. Jennifer Saunders stands out as the grandmother who has plenty of attitude and wisecracks. Beth, addicted to her phone and unhappy about the family’s relocation, delivers the film’s most powerful dialogue. She transitions from an egoistic teen into a person who puts the family first in her life, and that journey is portrayed in a much better way than everything that happens in the fantasy worlds just because the film shows her emotional transformation instead of rushing through it. This exemplifies the changes in success between the two stories in the movie “The Magic Faraway Tree.” When the plot is confined to the family story, the film draws real emotions, but once the family story moves to the imaginary realm, it loses substance. Although the production values are hugely impressive, they are not enough to compensate for the lack of a strong narrative. The movie’s length of one hour and fifty minutes is excessive for the simplicity of the story, which could have been cut in editing. A strange contradiction also sits at the center of the whole thing. The movie spends its runtime warning families that screens are stealing their attention and their connection to each other, then asks you to sit in a theater and stare at a screen for almost two hours to hear that message. It is a sweet lesson wrapped around an odd bit of hypocrisy. Kids probably will not notice. Grown-ups in the audience might. “The Magic Faraway Tree” is a safe, well-meaning movie for young families that does not ask much of its adult audience. It has a good heart, a talented cast that is not always used to its full strength, and a fantasy world that looks better than it feels. Kids will likely enjoy the colors and the silliness. Parents might end up enjoying Garfield and Foy more than the tree itself.
OUR RATING – A MAGICALLY SAFE 5