Miss
Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
(2016)
(SPOILERS) I
suspect I’ve said this before, but a cardinal mistakes critics of Tim Burton’s current
output make is suggesting he has somehow dumped on a magnificent early career. Really,
he’s been forever hit and miss, at least since Batman. The chief charge you could lay against him is that, somewhere
around Planet of the Apes, he began training
a keener eye for what might make a no-brainer commercial property, what might
benefit his bank account, rather than attaching himself to material he felt
passionate about or enthused by. That said, his last, Big Eyes, was his best in some considerable time (and, going
considerably against the grain, I rather liked Dark Shadows). Miss Peregrine’s
Home for Peculiar Children, while superior, feels like it’s coming from the
same calculated mind-set that picked out Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory and Alice
in Wonderland.
I don’t want
to appear too harsh on the movie, because it’s a perfectly reasonable,
immaculately-produced entertainment, but it succeeds mainly in leaving the
viewer profoundly unmoved. In that regard, it reminded me a little of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate
Events. There’s art direction in abundance, but it’s a smothering aspect of
a rather generically affected, fantasy sheen. It’s Burton-esque, basically, but
late (or mid) period: Plastic Burton.
Miss Peregrine has something workmanlike about it; it lacks
energy, and the undercurrent of anarchy found in most of Burton’s best pictures
is wholly absent. But then, as noted, he’s evidently done this for the dough,
having searched fruitlessly for a hit during the past half-decade. This
certainly won’t flop, and is bound to make its money back through post-cinema revenues
eventually, but giving him more than $100m to spend on the adaptation was never
going to be a good idea, any more than, in retrospect, letting Spielberg loose with
untold sums on The BFG.
On one
level, this feels like the closest the director has come to his most personal
misfit protagonist, Edward Scissorhands
(going against the grain again, I find that one a bit mushily overrated, truth
be told), which makes the pervading sense of the formulaic that much more disappointing
(there’s even an abundance of topiary). Perhaps Burton is simply caught in a
midlife “been there, done that”, but can’t quite admit it? Jane Goldman has
bashed out a solid screenplay, based on Ransom Riggs novel, but it’s no more
than that, and thus very much less than her collaborations with Martin Vaughn. The
picture earns its 12A/PG-13 certificate, with its plucked-out eyes and
monstrosities that resemble Venom by way of Silent
Hill punched through a Beetlejuice
hell, but it very rarely, except at a couple of points during the finale,
raises the pulse more than a notch.
Lead Asa
Buttefield is, as he usually is, competent, and maybe a wet blanket is what the
character of Jake demanded, but he doesn’t make for an especially compelling
lead (as such, he’s closer to Ewan McGregor in Big Fish, where, like here, the lead is a facilitator for colourful
supporting characters to attract all the attention). Everyone else, barring
perhaps Rupert Everett, who makes an impression entirely because he has done
some very terrible things to himself courtesy of the Surgeon General of Beverly
Hills (I actually double-took, seeing his name in the opening credits and then mulling
sadly whether that really was him, and
whether the reason he was wearing those elaborate prostheses would become
clear), is stronger.
Eva Green’s
good fun, enjoying the opportunity to “go big” for the part, accompanied by a jaunty
pipe and ebullient delivery (she’s almost doing a Depp, by way of Julie Andrews,
but without nearly as much self-indulgence), but unfortunately there just isn’t
enough of her (Miss Peregrine is absent for most of the first and third acts).
Another
Burton returnee, Terence Stamp, provides strong emotional grounding as Jake’s
grandfather Abe, including what I presume is an digitally-regressed scene as
his younger self. Chris O’Dowd is surprisingly decent as the contrastingly
emotionally distant dad who’d rather go birdwatching than attend to his son,
and the various cast of misfit miscreants, led by Ella Purnell’s Emma and
Dinlay MacMillan’s obnoxious Enoch, are memorable. Samuel L Jackson, like
Green, is unable to make much of an impact as villain Barron, while Judi Dench
is so blink or miss her, you wonder that they didn’t just cast Imelda Staunton
and make a saving.
The remote
Welsh island setting is suitably enticing, as is the time slip safety zone of
1943 (albeit reminiscent at points of Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who oeuvre, with its gas masks, WWII bombers and time
resets), but it’s a picture (I say this, as ever, failing to have read the
source material) that doesn’t even attempt to broach many of the issues its narrative
conceits raise.
Such as, if
Miss Peregrin is resetting the day every day to prevent her and her brood from
succumbing to German bombs, aren’t the kids cumulatively living an awfully long
time; should their minds not develop over the 70 years of reset days? Likewise,
the paradox created at the end, with Abe now surviving, is taken as a fait
accompli. I guess with the frequent disregard Back to the Futures and Terminators
have for such ramifications, this shouldn’t be surprising, but it rather
suggests no one had much interest plot integrity. As such, adding to the list
of logical puzzlements, if you knew you had a couple of gorgon twins up your
sleeve, who could turn anyone to stone at the merest lifting of their masks,
wouldn’t they be your first port of call when threatened by a Hollow or a
Wight?
The Nazi
element seems to have been rather soft-pedalled, after an early, rather meta-
moment when Dr Golan (Allison Janney), as yet unrevealed as the masquerading Barron,
persuasively argues that Abe’s tales of an untouched idyll for special
youngsters reflect his own wish, as a Jew, to escape the jackboot. (On the
issue of soft pedalling, I note also that Burton’s less than judiciously-chosen
words on the young cast’s lack of ethnic diversity have been self-righteously pounced
upon by the hyenas of movie groupthink).
What we’re
left with lacks the magical mode of transportation between worlds of, say, a
Narnia, or the resonance of a tale with potent subtext. When it comes to the
grand climax, set to a rather oddly chosen Blackpool dance anthem as skeletons
battle Hollows on the pier, one is left slightly appalled at the complete
disintegration of stalwart goth Burton in the face of euphoric cheese.
He does
muster up some solid scenes, of course; a sequence where Jake and Ella (her
gift being power over air) dive to the wreck of a ship, in which she produces
an air pocket (later refloating the entire vessel), clearly ate up most of the
budget, and is accordingly effectively visualised. And the ability of Enoch to
resurrect the dead is exactly the kind of gruesome trait you could see the
Burton of yesteryear embracing and giving to his lead character (the dolls Enoch fashions are somewhat redolent of
the Frankenstein patchworks in Joe Dante’s Small
Soldiers). Elsewhere, another kid, Hugh (Milo Parker), might induce a fresh
round of Izard-esque “I’m covered in
bees!” memes. Ironically, the rudely-rushed epilogue, as Jake breathlessly recounts
how he zipped through various experiences to arrive back at Emma’s side,
exhibits a verve the rest of the picture, far too relaxed and lackadaisical,
could have done with.
At this
point, provided Michael Keaton still has the inventive energy somewhere inside
him, I’d quite like to see that seemingly foresworn Beetlejuice sequel come to pass. Burton needs to re-embrace the
inner crazy, rather than the diluted and formulaic, which his last few family
entertainments very much have been. Miss
Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is agreeable but tepid, and even its
more ghoulish elements feel process-driven and painlessly palatable.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.