Steven Spielberg (2016)
At dead of night, a young girl called Sophie catches sight from a bedroom window of a huge figure in the street outside. When the figure sees that she’s seen him, he abducts Sophie. He tells her that she must spend the rest of her life with him – in Giant Country – so that she can’t reveal the existence of giants to others. Capturing Sophie sounds like typical ogre behaviour but, as his name suggests, the Big Friendly Giant (BFG) is entirely benevolent. He also catches dreams, which he bottles and blows into the bedrooms and minds of sleeping children. (He was on his nocturnal rounds when Sophie saw him.) Because, unlike other giants, he won’t eat human flesh, the BFG subsists on a diet of a vile-smelling vegetable called snozzcumber. The ‘friendly’ part of BFG subverts gigantic stereotyping. His nickname is Runt. He’s a skinny, plucky underdog beside other gargantuan denizens of Giant Country. It’s late in the day to ask this question – decades after Roald Dahl’s The BFG was first published and became a children’s favourite – but why isn’t he the Small Friendly Giant?
When he deservedly won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Bridge of Spies earlier this year, Mark Rylance began his acceptance speech with the following:
‘I’ve always … just adored stories. … So for me to have the chance to work with, I think, one of the greatest storytellers of our time, Steven Spielberg, has just been such an honour …’
This description of Spielberg is fair enough; Roald Dahl is widely regarded as another great storyteller; the coming together of the two might seem a match made in heaven. Yet the screen version of The BFG, with Rylance in the title role, is underwhelming. There are some amazing visual effects – at least, I suppose they’re amazing but I take them for granted. (Maybe I shouldn’t but that’s always been the way with movies able to perform how-did-they-do-that magic tricks.) The film is a two-hander – Runt and Sophie – much of the time and the events in Giant Country are just not that interesting. The big unfriendly giants – I’ll call them BUGs – are ugly and clumsy rather than scary. (They got on my nerves rather as the velociraptors in Jurassic Park did.) At the end of an early set-piece confrontation between Runt and the BUGs, John Williams’ score supplies a humorous flourish that echoes the comical anti-climax of cartoonish fights you’ve seen in plenty of other family movies. The effect of the music here, though, is to underline the anti-climactic quality of the sequence as a whole. It’s only when the Queen gets involved in the story that things liven up: the BFG’s visit to Buckingham Palace enables his collision with the real world (strange as it sounds to describe palace life as the real world), including a literal collision with a Louis Quinze chandelier. The menu for a breakfast fit for a Queen, a giant and a child with eyes bigger than her stomach is fun; so are the corgis, within their CGI limits. Runt brings the monarch a gift of his favoured drink, frobscottle; it’s a vivid green, it has downward bubbles and it supplies The BFG’s comic highlight. You get a sense – not least from the BUGs’ names: the Fleshlumpeater, the Gizzardgulper, the Meatdripper, and so on – that Roald Dahl has more appetite for blood, guts and bodily functions than the man who made this film. Spielberg is so polite that the pyrotechnical after-effects of fart-inducing frobscottle come as a relief – a letting off of steam in more ways than one.
I wasn’t clear until late in the film when the story was taking place. The opening shots suggest more or less modern London until the camera homes in on an orphanage – at the heart of the city, in a lamplit, cobbled street. The place connotes not only London past but also Spielberg past. (Orphanhood – or, at least, separation from parents – is a recurring condition of his child protagonists.) The score also sounds like John Williams dredging up what he’s written before. In much of what follows – even before Sophie’s taken to Giant Country – The BFG seems to be taking place in a movie-based once-upon-a-time rather than in an actual past, present or future. (I recall getting a similar impression from the only Harry Potter film that I’ve seen.) Once the Queen enters the fray, however, we’re jolted into a different environment – a capital city that is both picture-postcard London and the heart of an absolute monarchy. When she learns that children have been mysteriously disappearing, Her Majesty gets on the phone – first to ‘Boris’ (or that’s what I heard), then to Nancy and Ronnie. It’s the references to the Reagans – and memories of Margaret Thatcher’s special special relationship with them – that make the Queen’s hands-on leadership particularly weird. I still can’t work out who ‘Boris’ is – the 1980s may be right for glasnost and perestroika but they’re too early for a hotline to Yeltsin, let alone to the now ex-Mayor of London. Roald Dahl’s book was published in 1982 and the orphanage is the key location in that too. Yet I came out of The BFG feeling the film had manipulated the story’s setting in a cheesy and confusing way.
The one special effect that did register strongly with me was the CGI-isation of Mark Rylance’s Runt, which captures both the eccentric shape of the Quentin Blake illustrations for Dahl’s book and the blend of benignity and regret (and the laugh lines around the eyes) in Rylance’s truly beautiful face. When he speaks, the BFG is a sort of onomatopoeic malapropist: his vernacular verges on the tiresome (as do the tellings off from Sophie when he gets words wrong) but Rylance’s line readings, delivered in a West Country accent, are consistently inventive and enjoyable. He brings great warmth and a genuine sense of weariness to the character. As Sophie, Ruby Barnhill’s ordinary looks are appealing and she’s a precociously competent actress. (She was just eleven when the film was in production.) That competence is a mixed blessing. Much of what Barnhill does is very definitely acted – you don’t believe in the truth of some of the emotions she expresses. It would have been very difficult to avoid this problem, though: the girl playing Sophie has a lot to do – the role could hardly have been safely entrusted to a kid whose artless appeal was expected to see them through. Ruby Barnhill is likeable enough and she has some strong moments – as when Sophie insists she’s not scared but evidently is. Penelope Wilton’s playing of the Queen is admirably well judged and successful. As her butler, Rafe Spall struggles conscientiously to conceal the fact that he could do much more than he’s being asked to do. This is all the more true of Rebecca Hall, bizarrely cast as Mary, the Queen’s fragrantly innocuous maid. The BUGs are Jemaine Clement, Bill Hader, Michael David Adamthwaite, Daniel Bacon, Chris Gibbs, Adam Godley, Jonathan Holmes, Paul Moniz de Sa and Ólafur Ólafsson. The names of these creatures are their most entertaining feature by some way.
In the climax to the story, military effort and magic combine oddly to win the day. The Queen dispatches soldiers to Giant Country; the BFG feeds a nightmare to the BUGs so that they’ll feel remorse; the Fleshlumpeater alone resists this; he’s airlifted away by an army helicopter. The carnivorous giants are exiled to a life of snozzcumber on a remote island while Runt returns to Giant Country to cultiver son jardin of newly-discovered vegetables. Sophie ends up living at Buckingham Palace and Mary appears to be her mother. This made me wonder if what we’d seen had all been Sophie’s dream but this can’t be right: she remains in communication with the BFG whenever she feels the need. The ending feels, in short, a bit of a mess. Early on, when Sophie starts her night watch at the orphanage (which is strangely underpopulated), she puts an eiderdown round her to keep warm; it forms a kind of train and the orphanage cat hitches a lift on it. This charming visual detail is one of many but they’re not enough. The action isn’t exciting; the catching and transmission of dreams doesn’t turn out to be the emotionally powerful theme it promises to be. (The screenplay was by Melissa Mathison, who also wrote The Black Stallion and ET and who died late last year.) The BFG‘s certificate warns of ‘mild threat’. This is an overstatement.
1 August 2016
