“For the love of Thomas Hardy!”
To hear the review 

    Boy, the people in Inkheart sure love their books and authors.  References to a bunch of different books are made, dozens of books are shown, and of course books are central to the movie’s theme.  I was kind of hoping to see some more obscure books than The Wizard of Oz and The Hound of the Baskervilles, I suppose that since it’s a kids movie the books referenced ought to be kid-friendly.  But there was a pretty heavy over-reliance on The Wizard of Oz.  The movie is about Mo (Brendan Fraser), who is a silver-tongue.  Which means that he is one of the people in the world blessed with the unique ability to read written words and have those words come to life.

     Years ago, he read a book aloud to his infant daughter, a book called Inkheart.  When the book came to life, and the bad guys appeared, Mo’s wife (Sienna Guillory) disappeared into the book.  The bad guys decided they liked our world, and staked out an area away from the authorities.  We are to assume here that a giant castle a few miles from a major city where murders and kidnappings and slavery are taking place would escape the notice of the people in the surrounding area.  We are also to assume that no silver-tongue ever once reads out loud before the age of thirty.  (Otherwise, they might discover their gift earlier, which would be inconvenient for the plot.)

     I can suspend my disbelief for a kids movie when it comes to minor problems like these.  Which means that the single biggest flaw with the movie is Brendan Fraser.  He’s still adequate at playing the slightly befuddled potential action hero that he plays in just about every kids movie.  And although he is acting beside Helen Mirren and Jim Broadbent, two extremely high-caliber actors, he does not look out of place because they’re phoning it in.  Mirren and Broadbent, after all, are not Streep and DeNiro.  And Brendan Fraser is not Pauly Shore.  But they’re all pretty close.

     So if Fraser is watchable and not irritating, and he is the worst part of this movie, it must be at least decent, right?  Well, right.  Inkheart is, at least, decent.  A scenery-chewing performance by Andy Serkis, clearly having fun in the role of bad guy Capricorn, helps.  And a lot of the time, other characters than Mo are on the screen.  Less Fraser is better.  But many other characters are pointless, and not just Helen Mirren.  One of the 40 thieves is read out of the Arabian Nights, and joins our heroes for some time, for no discernible reason.  The author of Inkheart himself is dredged up, again for no apparent reason.  There are brief references to Peter Pan (a ticking crocodile), The Hound of the Baskervilles (a big wolf-dog with glowing eyes), and a unicorn and some flying monkeys.

     The flying monkeys appear to just be updated versions of those from the movie The Wizard of Oz, rather than something new that could conceivably have been read out of the book itself.  But no matter.  The best character in the movie is Broadbent’s.  He plays Fenoglio, a fire-juggler who was read out of Inkheart, and he just wants to go back into the book to rejoin his family.  Which leads to the most criminally underused actress of the movie.  Jennifer Connelly, who might be the best actress in the entire film, spends about three seconds of time on the screen as Fenoglio’s wife in the book.  She has no line of dialogue whatsoever, and never appears again.  Why bother?  I am hoping that on the cutting room floor, there is an additional forty minutes of the movie that involves Connelly in some important way, footage that will show up when the director’s cut gets released two years from now.  Here’s hoping.

     There is no explanation of the origins of these “silver-tongues” - it would be nice to know how they originated, or what is the source of their powers, or something.  Although when the obvious happens and Fraser’s daughter turns out to be a silver-tongue herself, I get to assume the whole thing is hereditary.  In fact, Fraser’s daughter, played by the wonderful Eliza Bennett, is the heart of the movie, and the most compelling character.  Her search for her missing mother and her confusion over her father’s powers rings true, and despite a really obvious and far too simple ending to the movie, she works hard at making it all reasonable.

     Of course, it’s not all reasonable at all.  The ending pretty much negates the movie entirely, in the sense that it’s something that, had it been done at the beginning (and it was the incredibly obvious thing to do), there would have been no need for the movie at all.  And the postscript, where Fenoglio is sent home (to a wife whose face we never see - I suppose Jennifer Connelly had left the set by that time), conveniently ignores all the rules of silver-tonguery that have been laid out over the course of the rest of the film.  There are many problems with Inkheart, and on one level it’s terrible.

     But I preferred to watch Inkheart with an open mind, and a sense of awe, and certain scenes provide that awe.  The special effects are solid for the most part, and Eliza Bennett and Jim Broadbent are good enough to convey the sense of power that comes from reading written words aloud and bringing books to life.  Throughout, Inkheart is entertaining and well-paced, and although it misses the mark a lot, it hits the mark often enough to be at least decent.

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 20th, 2009 at 11:29 am and is filed under 2009, Andy Serkis, Brendan Fraser, Eliza Bennett, Fantasy, Helen Mirren, Iain Softley, Jennifer Connelly, Jim Broadbent, Kids, Literary adaptation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.