One thing that you can bet the sheep station on is that a Steven Spielberg movie will have a happy ending. Jaws is still my favourite, but, besides confronting the holocaust and being obsessed with boys’ own high adventure (yet another ‘Indiana Jones’ has been announced), Spielberg has become a little over-keen on juvenilia. His latest is gorgeous to look at, which we knew it would be, but the CGI far outweighs the content – like so much we see now, it is smoke and mirrors gone mad.
It opens with Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) being abducted from a London orphanage by a stooped, balding giant. With ill-lit cobbled streets and two-storey Georgian houses, the mood is Dickensian (the Big Friendly Giant will place ‘Nicholas Nickleby’ on the bed he provides for Sophie), but there are VWs on the roads and Ronnie and Nancy, we later learn, are in the White House. The BFG (Mark Rylance) is a dream-catcher (could anybody possibly believe that a ten-year-old English boy’s ultimate dream is to be called for advice by the US president?), who inhabits a distant land where he is bullied by even bigger giants who are stealing children from the Midlands. Sophie decides to right matters by going to Buck House and asking the Queen (Penelope Wilton) for help. Notwithstanding the American obsequiousness when dealing with the British royalty, this sequence (in which Phil the Greek does not share his wife’s bed) is by far the most amusing – the kids around me got a tremendous kick out of Her Maj farting after drinking a bubbly green drink given to her by the BFG. The corgis are good too, but overall the story is a bit slow moving with no strong moral conundrum driving it. Nor is Spielberg now above self-reference – Sophie reaching out to touch BFG’s finger is ET all over again (which in turn was Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam). Barnhill is cute in a ‘little missy’ way and Rylance is agreeably avuncular but, though visually stunning, it is entirely forgettable.
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I was shocked by how badly this tanked at the box office. I figured Spielberg’s name would be enough to bring audiences in. I wish it had done better.