Tuck Everlasting Review
by Jonathan F. Richards (moviecritic AT prodigy DOT net)October 15th, 2002
IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
TUCK EVERLASTING
Directed by Jay Russell
PG, 90 minutes
There are some stories that flower in the imagination directly from the printed page; wrap them in celluloid and you choke them to death. That may be the case with "Tuck Everlasting", the new movie crafted for the Disney label by Jay Russell ("My Dog Skip") from Natalie Babbitt's 1975 children's classic about a family of reluctant immortals. On the other hand, it could just be a bad movie of a wonderful book. That's happened before too.
In Russell's adaptation, poor little rich girl Winnie Foster (Alexis Bledel) has added five years to her ten in the book, a curious point of departure for a story about a fountain of youth that stops aging dead in its tracks. But Disney wanted to play up the romantic angle, and fifteen was a more age-appropriate pairing for the seventeen-year-old Jesse Tuck (Jonathan Jackson). Of course Jesse turns out to be a hundred and four...but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Our story begins with a helmeted motorcyclist tooling through a small town and pulling up in front of a well-to-do home withdrawn at a seemly distance behind a picket fence. As the young man doffs his headgear and gazes wistfully at the house, a female voice on the soundtrack says: For some people, time passes slowly. For others, there's never enough....
And we're whisked back in time to the early part of the last century, where teenaged Winnie pines away behind the picket fence under the stern hand of her mother and father (Amy Irving and Victor Garber) and dreams wistfully that there must be something more to life. She doesn't know the half of it. When her parents announce they're sending her away to boarding school, she bolts into the woods, where she meets handsome, sensitive Jesse. No sooner has love-at-first-sight hit them with the force of a stun gun than his grouchy older brother Miles gallops through the clearing, snatches her up onto his horse, yells something menacing about what they do to strangers, and kidnaps her back to the family cabin.
This is Winnie's introduction to the Tucks, a family of four headed by papa Angus (William Hurt) and mama Mae (Sissy Spacek). The Tucks have a secret: a century or so earlier they happened on a fountain of youth in these woods, drank from it, and now they can't age or die. They're stuck on the great wheel of immortality, and none too happy about it. "Don't be afraid of death," Angus advises Winnie. "Be afraid if the unlived life."
Miles, who was happy until his wife left him when she discovered his drinking problem, now goes off to every war he can find, which doesn't seem sporting, given that he can't be killed. Jesse travels the world and brings back souvenirs, but his adolescent outlook on life doesn't seem to change. Angus and Mae spend their time laying low and avoiding contact with "humans", except when Mae goes into town to see Miles and Jesse, who seem to live there when they're not off doing their things.
I don't mean to make the story sound silly. In the book it weaves compelling magic. But on the screen it's been reduced to a cross between a movie-of-the-week and a deodorant soap commercial. Jesse and Winnie chase each other giddily through meadows the way only young lovers can who know there's a camera on them and a director poised to yell "Cut!". They jump in a swimming hole and somehow refrain from splashing each other, but they do get this bit of dialogue:
Winnie (who can't swim): "Don't let go!"
Jesse: "There's no chance of that, Winnie Foster. I'm never going to let you go."
A mysterious Man in a Yellow Suit (Ben Kingsley) is on the trail of the Tucks and their commercially exploitable magic waters, and it needs no more than a look at the color of his suit to tumble to the fact that he's up to no good.
With three Oscar winners (Hurt, Spacek, and Kingsley) in the stable, this picture should have delivered something special. But even their acting isn't very good. Kingsley manages a bit of swagger, but Hurt labors under an unidentifiable accent, and none of them can find a way through the flaccid, hackneyed script and the careless direction from Russell, who cut his directorial teeth making tourism commercials for Governor Bill Clinton's Arkansas.
At the picture's end, we return to the opening scene of the motorcyclist, who we now know to be Jesse, still seventeen, and the voice of the narrator (who is she?)again intones: For some people, time passes slowly ....
By now, we know what she means.
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
