Film Reviews

What is one to make of a film with a complex, convoluted plot covering four generations that is told by flash backs in which there are no car chases, no gore but just a delightful bringing together of many multifaceted strands of stories into one great resolution? The film despite being 2 hours long is told astonishingly economically in which every scene is made to work and to help tell this story.
It starts with Stanley Yelnats (a palindromic name), whose family has been cursed for four generations. He is walking along the street when a pair of trainers, seemingly from no where knocks him over. He picks up the trainers, but before he has gone a few yards police cars, with sirens wailing, surround him. He is arrested taken to court and sentenced because these trainers are no ordinary trainers but those of baseball legend Clyde 'Sweet Feet' Livingston which were stolen as they were being sold at an auction for the local orphanage. Stanley is sent to a juvenile correction facility called Camp Green Lake (there is no lake, it is in an arid desert, and it is hardly a camp) where the evil Warden (Sigourney Weaver) makes the inmates dig holes (5ft by 5ft by 5ft) in the desert each day. And so the bizarre story is set in motion.
Is this story for children or adults? I thoroughly enjoyed it and I went with a wide age range of children who also seemed to enjoy it although they got thoroughly bemused by the plot. It is rare that one comes across a film that is so different from the general formulaic approaches and yet so well made and so full of human values and warmth without becoming saccharinic or false to the difficulties and evils that one finds in the real world. It is a film that is written in a moral universe. There is also the strangest feeling throughout the film, and even more so in the book, of something supernatural breaking through, coincidences are piled on coincidences giving an almost providential quality to everything. This is a great antidote to the sort of trivial realism that a lot of teenage films have.
This film is a joy to watch especially for adults.
Reviewed by Alan Dodd