MADELINE (1998)
Rating: 2.5 stars (out of 4.0) ******************************** Key to rating system: 2.0 stars - Debatable 2.5 stars - Some people may like it 3.0 stars - I liked it 3.5 stars - I am biased in favor of the movie 4.0 stars - I felt the movie's impact personally or it stood out ********************************* A Movie Review by David Sunga
Directed by: Daisy von Scherler Mayer
Written by: Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, from the book by Ludwig Bemelmans.
Starring: Hatty Jones and Frances McDormand
Ingredients: Paris boarding school for 12 young girls, adventures of little girl
Synopsis: MADELINE begins with the opening of a storybook, and it should, considering that it's a storybook movie for children. MADELINE doesn't follow the normal stereotypical formats for action movies, comedies, et cetera. Instead, MADELINE kind of wanders around, allowing the audience to hear the tale, and experience spunky little Madeline's various adventures, including discovering a kidnapping plot by goofy circus clowns, and saving her boarding school.
Madeline (Hatty Jones) is an little British orphan girl who lives with twelve other young girls in a charitable boarding school in Paris. The school is run by the intuitive nun, Miss Clavel (Frances McDormand), who can often smell when "something is not right." In this case, something is often not right, since Madeline is always getting into one form of mischief or another.
Madeline's adventures include having an operation at the hospital, falling into a river, looking for a lost dog, befriending a neighborhood boy, trying to figure out why the boarding school's owner Lord Covington wants to close down the school, and foiling a kidnapping attempt on the Spanish ambassador's son.
Opinion: Summer movies always seem to be geared towards adolescent males (or as my girlfriend would say, the adolescent in all males). Main characters? Male cop, male detective, male kid, male oil driller, male doctor, male cowboy, male secret agent, male pig, male scientist, male plastic toy, male dog. And the hero always has to save things on a really grand scale. He fights off 100 thugs single-handedly, saves the town, saves the free world, saves his city, saves America, saves his female partner and the Earth, et cetera et cetera. Movies for adults demand that heroes do fantasy on a big scale.
On the other hand, elementary school-aged kids have a different mentality. To a kid, spending a night in the hospital getting your tonsils taken out is suspenseful. Looking for your lost dog is dramatic. Saving a baby bird is simply monumental. Adults swallow movies with formula plots. But to a kid, walking around meeting new friends and escaping trouble suffices for plot. As a result, kid movies are way different from adult movies.
The problem is, these days hardly anyone knows how to make kid movies. Typical of most attempts are kiddie-aged heroes who are supposed to speak like real kids, but end up sounding like hipper-than-thou thirty-something script writers. And it's especially rare to find a movie where the protagonist is a spunky elementary school-aged girl who actually thinks and acts like an elementary school-aged girl. How many can you think of, off the top of your head?
Rare, indeed. That's what makes MADELINE is somewhat of a gem, despite arguably anglo-centric overtones (in the movie, Africans and Indians are exoticized and tricked). MADELINE is done from a small girl's point of view, and it's done well. It's simply a story about a little girl who has a few neat little adventures. No emotional baggage, weighty cynicism, fancy tricks, world-banging drama, no violence, no sex, no gore. Just the simple wonder of being young and wondrous and meeting interesting folks and having occasional excitement. Throw in scenes involving a loyal doggy, a caring old woman, adventure at the circus, and an exciting kidnapping, and your kids have themselves a quality movie.
Reviewed by David Sunga July 13, 1998
Copyright © 1998 by David Sunga This review and others like it can be found at THE CRITIC ZOO: http://www.criticzoo.com email: zookeeper@criticzoo.com
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