BEFORE: Jim Broadbent carries over from "The Sense of an Ending", and I've now got linking concerns - my next film was going to be the 2011 version of "The Borrowers", because according to Wikipedia, there's one actress in both versions. But something tells me that's a mistake, because IMDB no longer credits her in both films, I think it used to, but it's since been corrected. So what I've been believing for over a year may not be true, I got some bad intel. Tomorrow I'm going to have to correct this little problem, I'm not letting my chain die in the first week of the year. More on this tomorrow.
THE PLOT: A secret family of 4-inch people living inside the walls of a house must save their home from an evil real estate developer.
AFTER: It seems they're always running this film on Starz Family - plus they also ran the 2011 BBC remake last year, and I managed to dub both of them from the On Demand channel, and put them on a DVD together. I really wanted to watch them close together for comparative purposes. It still could happen, I just need to find the right mortar to connect the bricks. Check back tomorrow, I think I'm close to something...
This whole film felt very rushed to me, I don't know, was this just the way they made films for kids, back in the 20th century? There's no character development, there's barely any time spent on introducing the characters before they're all thrown together, with the small boy putting the pieces together when small objects keep disappearing around the house. Now, the quickest answer would be some kind of pack rat, or maybe everyone in the house is all getting similarly absent-minded, but the boy thinks something else is going on. It's only about 10 minutes later that he spots one, and puts her under a glass, then in a fishbowl for observation.
And they speak the same language (convenient) and there's no issue understanding each other, despite their difference in size. Now, I would think that a much larger (regular-sized to you or me) boy, who's essentially a GIANT to one of the Borrowers, would be likely to deafen a person who's only four inches tall, just by speaking in his regular voice, because her eardrums are so small and fragile by comparison. By the same token, logically she should have to shout at the top of her lungs, just to have the boy hear her, but none of this is shown on film, because it would only confuse children over why one of the small characters is shouting and the other large one is whispering. Maybe that's just how I their interaction should go down, but on the other hand, my cat is pretty quiet and I hear her just fine, she doesn't have to meow very loudly when she wants my attention.
The conflict is introduced just as quickly, with the parents going to see an estate lawyer who tells them that since they don't have a copy of some aunt's will handy, that they have to move out of their house. Which honestly seems like a NITPICK POINT to me, because that's a document that should have been filed with the county, so there should be a copy of it on record down at the courthouse. But let's assume that the Lenders don't know this, they're not legal experts after all, and anyway, it's clear that the lawyer is trying to take advantage of them. He wants to turn the house into a 27-unit luxury apartment complex or something, and it's also pretty convenient that he states his whole evil plan out loud when he's at the house looking for the will, so the audience and a couple of the Borrowers can figure out what he's up to.
Perhaps this is all designed to keep the story moving rather quickly, because we all know that kids in the ADHD Generation won't sit still to watch a movie for that long, and also they need to see a lot of people falling down or getting injured if they're going to stay entertained - it's the "Home Alone" theory of 1990's kids movies. This movie takes advantage of that, and keeps finding ways to knock down or injure John Goodman's lawyer character - he gets burned by pesticides, electrocuted, tied up, and covered in cheese, I think all in the same day. But again, he's a LAWYER, so don't tell me that he doesn't deserve this. Plus he's evil for good measure, and a future slumlord, but really, isn't LAWYER enough?
Probably we're not supposed to spend much time thinking about the logistics of there being 4-inch people in the world, hiding under the floorboards and between the walls of houses - like are they the same species as regular-sized people, or a different one? Homo minisculus? Do they have the same legal rights as humans, like here killing one doesn't seem to have any more implications as squashing a bug or poisoning a mouse. What's up with that? Shouldn't someone organize a protest march or the legal rights of very tiny people? They look like people, they can think and talk, so aren't they people? This is extreme size discrimination by the norms, and tiny lives matter.
I'm recalling how in the movie "Downsizing" some people became tiny by choice, to improve their standards of living and reduce the amount of food consumed and therefore become less of a strain on the planet's resources. That film could have borrowed a few ideas from this one, only they sent the tiny people off to live together in tiny cities (domed for protection from predators like lizards and foxes, or from small puddles that would be giant floods to them) but why not allow the tiny people to live in the spaces in-between our existing walls and floors? A whole tiny family could probably live off of the crumbs that fall off of my plate and land on the floor. It's all relative, right?
You might also ask, why did Potter come to find the will at the house, especially if he DIDN'T want it to be found? Aha, N.P. #2, I think. It would have been so easy for Potter, if he already had the will at his office, to just burn it or lose it, or say that it was lost. So I guess it had to REALLY be lost, but then how did he know it was in a hidden safe at the house? The deceased aunt only told him it was "in the house", but she didn't say where, and she didn't say it was in a safe - so how did he know to look for one, and to bring the right tools to crack the safe? Again, this just feels like some writer skipped a few steps or was encouraged to keep things moving and not get bogged down in details. I still maintain, though, that the easiest course of action would be to NOT look for the will and just keep saying it was lost. But then, maybe he had to find it just to make sure that nobody else did? I guess if the house was torn down, then someone WOULD find the safe? OK, so why not wait until then, and just be standing by when the safe is found by the demolition team?
I think if all else fails, at this point I could get a job in Hollywood looking for errors in screenplays, giving writers notes on parts of their scripts that are unrealistic or don't make any sense. I think I'd be good at that.
If the youngest Borrower seems familiar, he started playing Draco Malfoy in "Harry Potter" movies about 4 years after this. And if the human-sized boy seems familiar, he was the young boy in "Jumanji" two years earlier, and also the voice of Chip in Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" in 1991.
Also starring John Goodman (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Mark Williams (last heard in "Early Man"), Celia Imrie (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Bradley Pierce (last seen in "Jumanji"), Flora Newbigin, Hugh Laurie (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Tom Felton (last seen in "Risen"), Raymond Pickard, Ruby Wax (last seen in "The Final Conflict"), Aden Gillett, Doon Mackichan, Bob Goody
RATING: 4 out of 10 empty milk bottles
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