Steven Spielberg’s first film for Disney and his weakest box office performer in a while, The BFG is, like its title character, an odd, sometimes lumbering, occasionally inspired beast. Written by the late Melissa Mathison and adapted from Roald Dahl’s much-loved book, The BFG has obvious parallels to Spielberg and Mathison’s best-known collaboration, E.T. – The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) as a tale of a young person and a strange creature finding fellowship and changing each-other’s lives. The story kicks off with one of the classic hooks of children’s literature: young heroine Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) is growing up in a London orphanage, a misfit who can’t sleep and so haunts the dark corridors and spaces of the orphanage at night, reading, snooping, and generally leading a solitary existence. Amidst a recent spate of disappearing children and ignoring warnings not to look beyond the safe confines of hearth and home, Sophie gazes out the window one night and catches sight of something huge and dark padding through the darkened city streets. The monstrous being, when he realises he’s being watched, reaches into through the window, plucks Sophie from her bed, and makes his way through the night with her cast as pint-sized Fay Wray. This sequence is the strongest in the film, recalling E.T. and Elliott’s night flight in its moonlit vistas and evocation of wondrous passage but laced with a fresh edge of comic ingenuity, manifest in the giant’s ruses and physical inspiration, hiding himself in urban lanes from passing cars and wandering drunks in spite of his seemingly unmistakable bulk, posing as a lamppost or just a black mass in a crook. Then he breaks out into the country spaces and runs pell-mell across the land, springing between the pinnacles of rock forms before making it to the remote island off the Scottish coast where he and other giants reside.
The giant proves to be a relatively small example of his kind, dubbed Runt (Mark Rylance) by the other, bigger members of the clan inhabiting the island – oafish brutes who like to bully him, and who have charming names like Fleshlumpeater (Jemaine Clement) and Bloodbottler (Bill Hader). Most giants also have no problem eating human beings, who are wonderfully snack-sized portions for creatures of their stature. The giants however have fallen from their former state as nature’s aristocrats to become devolved and bestial. Runt, however, maintains something of a civilised state in his cave, a den of industrious contraptions and refitted materials, including his bed, an old sailing ship, trying to live however cheerlessly on a steady diet of foods derived from a gross vegetable common on the island called snozzcumber. At first Sophie is angry and alarmed at Runt’s news that she’ll have to spend the rest of her life in the cave lest she let the rest of the world know about the giants, but in his company Sophie soon falls asleep for the first time in years. She’s also blessed by him with a dream, as one of Runt’s pastimes is collecting dreams that emanate from a sacred tree on the island. Given the more agreeable title of BFG – Big Friendly Giant, of course – Runt braves the gauntlet of his fellow giants to give Sophie a tour of his land, and eventually agrees to take her home when it becomes sure sooner or later the other giants will find her out and eat her. Sophie devises a plan to help free both BFG and Britain from the tyranny of the other giants, a plan that involves making contact with the Queen (Penelope Wilton) and using BFG’s talent for fashioning dreams to warn her about the danger.
The BFG is such a gorgeous work in places, mixing great technical heft in concert with a light and evanescent emotional tone, that it almost coasts by on sheer good vibes. The autumnal mood that’s been descending upon Spielberg’s work since War Horse (2011) is surprisingly pronounced here in spite of the youthful focus of the work: it’s clear that Spielberg has adopted BFG as another of his avatars, an ageing, life-wearied creature who’s happy with his lot as a provider of other’s people’s dreams and wants only to be left to his art in peace. The narrative depends on his ability to forge a convincing and powerful allusion that can persuade a leader to take action, making the film in part a parable for the artist’s role in society. BFG and Sophie’s venture to the dream tree is a beautifully crafted moment, one that achieves a kind of perfect, iconic simplicity in evoking the power of the fantastic, touching fertility myth and metaphor for the creative urge and the wellsprings of the unconscious with equal felicity and visual power. The environs of BFG’s lair and Sophie’s adventures within it, whether trying to escape or evading the other giants as they ransack the place in search of her, are all worked with such a simple mastery of craft that the effects don’t get in the way of appreciating Rylance’s excellent performance. The film’s climax isn’t the takedown of the other giants, which comes duly, but an extended, cunningly orchestrated and authentically childish sequence in which BFG is given the Queen’s hospitality. This simple courtesy requires all manner of appropriations and repurposing of household and garden implements, building to one of the best fart jokes in all of screen history when the giant returns the hospitality by treating the Queen and her staff to his home-brewed beverage frobscottle, which causes giant gaseous eruptions of green exhaust from the posterior.
As a blithe time-out from reality and wistful meditation on his basic themes from Spielberg, The BFG is certainly worthwhile. But on other levels, The BFG left me feeling as nearly as bemused and frustrated as the box office. I never read Dahl’s source novel as a kid, and so there was no specific thrill for me in seeing it illustrated, and the feeling this probably should have been a 45-minute animated film rather than a two-hour, huge budget release by a major director never entirely dissipates. The very slight, virtually plotless tale is certainly the stuff of bedtime recital for young children, as opposed to the acidic, satire-laced flourishes of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory older kids have lapped up for decades. But in seeing it filmed here, the material and the filmmakers’ approach to it sometimes felt indefinably mannered, holding back from darker dimensions and intense emotional straits. Is there some bitter irony in the fact that Spielberg, so long the superlative mediator between childlike imagination and adult craft, has finally made a film that plays like an adult’s idea of children’s entertainment rather than the real deal? One real problem is that we’re essentially told that Sophie is a plucky young thing with preternatural verve (“I have instincts!” she ominously informs BFG, impressing him with her use of words as opposed to most humans who extemporise about their smarts instead) who becomes linked to the giant on a profound level. And yet neither Sophie nor her relationship with the big fella ever convince on a simple, essential dramatic level. The two characters usually speak at each-other, Rylance’s oddly realistic characterisation quite different from Barnhill’s plucky-girl cliché.
The mo-cap animation is better than what Robert Zemeckis offered a decade ago in his ventures up this particular alley. The results are occasionally truly lovely and elsewhere dull and disposably pretty, like the background from some mid-90s video game, all weightless figures, smooth, smudgy grass, and Thomas Kinkade-licenced Master of Light stuff. The use of colour is however impressive, even dazzling – somehow Spielberg and DP Janusz Kaminski manage to realise the idea of the subconscious as a physical reality through use of an alchemist’s panoply of hues, as BFG mixes the ingredients of dreams, harvested like rare butterflies and loopy lightning bugs. This might be a sentence I never expected to write, but Spielberg’s palette here and his sense of colour as metaphysical totem reminded me at points of Mario Bava. Mathison’s script is interestingly structured as a series of lengthy, sketch-like scenes that stretch out with leisurely, conversant, unforced geniality. But this conspires to choke off any particular resonance in Sophie’s status as outcast and in her connection with BFG: there’s no substantive portrayal of Sophie’s miserable daily existence as an orphan or sense of time passing and bonds deepening between her and her hulking new pal. The world The BFG takes place in is entirely hermetic, reproducing the same mistake as Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter entries, severing the tale from necessary grounding in reality, exacerbated by the vague British setting and timeframe – part Victoriana, part 1950s, part 1980s (when the book was published – a joke about the Queen calling up the Reagans is tossed in for perturbing effect). Barnhill’s flat and brittle performance does little to make Sophie seem anything more than a rather blank place-holder, one who has regulation traits ticked off rather than seemingly like a real child tossed into a strange and terrifying situation.
Some other characters are brought in later, like the Queen, and her aide Mary (Rebecca Hall) and security honcho Tibbs (Rafe Spall), who offer Sophie the possibility of a real home and surrogate family. Wilton is a quiet delight, depicting unflappable poise under ruffled feathers — the look she gives after having expelled a frobscottle-fuelled fart, as if she’s found the perfect toast to stir fighting gumption, tickled me greatly. But, again, the fulfilled fantasy of homecoming and the pangs of separation that dog Sophie and BFG after life parts them just don’t pack the punch they should. It’s as if Spielberg was just a little too determined this particular excursion light and breezy. The lack of complication isn’t necessarily a great problem if the mood is sustained and the dedication to character interaction florid and engaging, but after a while the absence of anything like compulsion also highlights that there isn’t that much else to sustain interest other than enjoying some of Spielberg’s staging for its own sake. Compared to Joe Wright’s much-panned but rather enjoyably gonzo Pan from last year, which took on very similar material and laced it with pirates on bungee cords snatching orphans from their beds, flying ships dodging Luftwaffe fighters, and Nirvana choral sing-alongs, The BFG feels not just staid but like a failure of real imagination, too busy humming hymns to the desire for enchantment and not working hard enough to actually provide some. And yet, for all this, in vital flashes you still feel The BFG is an honest statement from Spielberg, an attempt to summarise his legacy, bespeak of his deepest and most sustained convictions, and say goodbye to a beloved collaborator.
