MATILDA
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 1996 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Directed by Danny DeVito Rating: **1/2 (Maltin scale)
A film review by David N. Butterworth Copyright 1996 David N. Butterworth/The Summer Pennsylvanian
Danny DeVito's MATILDA isn't about a boxing kangaroo. It's an adaptation of Roald Dahl's beloved tale of a little girl with amazing powers who's "born into a family that doesn't always appreciate her."
As Matilda, Mara Wilson (one of the kids in MRS. DOUBTFIRE) is predictably annoying. Someone must have told her once that acting means blinking a lot and I, for one, felt sorry that they didn't cast the marsupial instead.
Fortunately, there's enough to like outside of the title character to make MATILDA worthwhile.
Neglected by her worthless parents Harry and Zinnia Wormwood (Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman), Matilda is forced to feed, clothe, and educate herself from a very early age. By the time she's four, she's read every magazine in the house and starts walking ten blocks to the library each day in order to enjoy such classics as Ivanhoe, Moby Dick, and The Pickwick Papers. She can also do complex calculations in her head.
Her parents are so caught up in their tiny little lives that they barely notice Matilda's burgeoning genius. When Harry finds her reading novels, he chastises her with "there's nothing you can learn from a book that you can't learn from TV more quickly." His idea of quality family time is snarfing cheese doodads while watching endless game shows.
DeVito and Perlman are clearly having fun in their roles. Perlman is colorfully over-the-top as the Brooklynesque, bingo-obsessed Zinnia and DeVito is equally excessive--and very funny--as the shady car dealer Harry, who fails to realize Matilda's true potential.
Harry's booming trade in stolen auto parts interferes with this daughter's formal education. "Who'll sign for the packages!?" he gasps, when his six-and-a-half year old finally asks to be sent to school.
But sent to school she is, to the bleak and imposing Crunchem Hall, whose principal Agatha Trunchbull is a tyrant of monstrous proportions. An ex-Olympian at shot-put, hammer-throw, and javelin, Trunchbull instills fear in the students with the crack of a riding crop, throwing these "squirming worms of vomit," "walking pustules" and other sleights out of windows, or locking them in the "chokey."
"Use the rod, beat the child" is Trunchbull's personal adage, and it's in keeping with the school's particularly downbeat motto: "If you are having fun, you are not learning."
As Trunchbull, British actress Pam Ferris offers a tour-de-force performance. Ferris is rarely photographed more than two inches from the camera lens, so we get to see her blemished skin and decaying dental work in excruciating detail, adding to her gargantuan nastiness. There's a nicely bitter and twisted tone in her portrayal of the brutish headmistress. DeVito obviously delights in the macabre--witness the black humor in THE WAR OF THE ROSES and RUTHLESS PEOPLE--and when he revels in the darker side of Dahl's original story, MATILDA works best.
Being big fans of Mary Kate and Ashley, my daughters had no problem with Mara Wilson's acting prowess. They liked Matilda and her sweet yet ineffectual teacher Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz); they laughed at the funny bits and cowered during the scary bits; and they cheered at the ending, when Matilda uses her phantasmagorical powers to thwart the evil Trunchbull.
The caricatures of evil in the film may be one-dimensional, but they're infinitely more fun than Matilda's forced precociousness. If you can look past Wilson's cloying exhibition and appreciate the supporting performances, MATILDA is everything it should be--an enjoyable children's fantasy.
-- David N. Butterworth
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews