A LITTLE PRINCESS
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A World War I vintage children's book
by the author of THE SECRET GARDEN is given a very
nice production. Unfortunately, there is good
reason why they don't write children's stories like
this any more. How the virtuous young heroine's
kindness and bad luck gets her into trouble is a
lot more believable than how she gets out. Still,
this is a well-crafted film and one that adults can
appreciate as much as children. Rating: low +1 (-4
to +4)
In 1993 Warner Brothers scored a coup with the critics for their adaptation of THE SECRET GARDEN by Frances Hodgson Burnett. That wasa cloyingly sweet if unconvincing moral tale for children. Perhaps sensing the mood of the country is moving back to the same sort of sympathies it had at that time, Warner Brothers is again adapting one of Burnett's stories, this one--A LITTLE PRINCESS--has been done twice before, once with Mary Pickford in 1917 and again with Shirley Temple in 1939. I will say at the outset that this is not the kind of story that does much for me, It is not that I do not like children's films, but Caroline Thompson's excellent BLACK BEAUTY is much closer to what would appeal to me. In spite of the fact that that film is a story told by a horse, I found it far more touching and believable than this exaggerated and contrived tale. A far better treatment of similar themes was in another example of a better children's film THE JOURNEY OF NATTY GANN.
As with THE SECRET GARDEN, this film opens with a young girl brought up in India but having to return to her native country. In this case it is imaginative Sara Crewe (Liesel Matthews) who loves the tales she has been told from the Ramayana. But it is 1914 and called to war is Sara's widower father (Liam Cunningham, who also plays the blue-skinned Prince Rama in the too few dramatized sequences from the Ramayana). Sara is placed in Minchin School for Girls in New York. The school is ruled over by the very repressed and autocratic Miss Minchin (Eleanor Bron, veteran of films going back to the great BEDAZZLED). Minchin is clearly jealous of the advantages that wealth has brought Sara. But the audience knows that Sara's popularity is the result of her story-telling ability which she uses to enliven the lives of the other students. Sara believes that a happy fantasy is better than a grim reality. When Sara's fortunes are reversed, however, Miss Minchin is quick to turn Sara from a pampered student into a cruelly used slave. Sara is forced to give up her studies and work in the school instead. Still Sara has the ability to make and keep friends including the other girls at the school and (from across the way) the enigmatic Indian servant Ram Dass (Errol Sitahol) and his monkey called--what else?--Hanuman, after the king of monkeys from the Ramayana.
Top billing goes to Eleanor Bron with a Frankensteinian shock of gray hair. Second billing goes to Liam Cunningham as the slightly too good to be true father. Liesel Matthews, who carries the film, must be content with third billing because she is a child and a newcomer. Almost all to the other cast members are unfamiliar, but the acting is uniformly good.
A LITTLE PRINCESS, like THE SECRET GARDEN, wants to be a moral tale but falls more into the realm of kiddie film noir. It is not her virtue that saves Sara. Coincidence is what saves her. And her virtues are a big part of what gets her into the trouble in the first place. The film does, to its credit, show some of the value of imagination. The villainous Miss Minchin is trying to eradicate any imagination from her girls. Yet it is the escape that comes from the imagination that the girls really need. This would be a very interesting film to see paired with Peter Jackson's HEAVENLY CREATURES.
Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron gives the film a nice feel for a New York girls' school of the time (though actually the novel was set in an English girls' school). His film most comes alive when he is portraying scenes from the Ramayana and he seriously might consider lengthier dramatizations of that epic work. He gets some details wrong. My wife noticed that his map of World War I Europe included a Yugoslavia that would not come into existence until after the war. His depiction of gas warfare might be strong stuff for children if they really understood what they were seeing.
But the biggest fault is this. A LITTLE PRINCESS is a superbly contrived story in which a young girl seems destined to be badly punished for being intelligent and imaginative. Then the extremely unsubtle hand of the author reaches out and saves the poor girl at the last possible moment by a series of unconvincing and nearly impossible coincidences. There is little doubt that in the real world Sara would not have been so fortunate. Boy, am I glad I didn't read this one when I was young and impressionable.
I am afraid that I am just not destined to like any film based on Frances Hodgson Burnett books. This was only a little better than THE SECRET GARDEN and I give it a low +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mark.leeper@att.com
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