Roald Dahl is renowned for his willingness to creep out his youthful audience as much as inspire them, the likes of The Witches (and its genuinely disturbing 1990 movie version) or even Charlie and the Chocolate Factory delighting in some pretty dark or grotesque narrative beats.
In The BFG, however, though its central character – a young orphan named Sophie – is pitted against “human bean”-chomping monsters, the focus is absolutely on her heartwarming friendship with the title character.
He's a gentle “runt” of a giant – only half the size of the 50-foot carnivorous denizens of his land, evocatively named along the lines of the Fleshlumpeater and Gizzard Gulper – who makes up for his compatriots’ savagery by harvesting luminous, tangible dreams and blowing them into the sleep of the “chiddlers” he visits under cover of night.It’s best to be forewarned going in, then, that this is Spielberg attempting full ‘wonderment’ mode – the likes of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E.T. or, gulp, Hook – and not to be confused with thrill-a-minute spectacles like his Indiana Jones movies or Jurassic Park, which also feature characters gazing up in awe at some breathtaking spectacle, but only as a bridge between kinetic chase or fight scenes.
Mathison has opened up the novel’s very talky first half with a couple of action sequences involving the villainous giants’ clumsy antics, but they do feel a little Tintin-ish and tacked on.
Integrated much more effectively is the visit to an upside-down, underwater (but strangely dry) Dream Country, whose dream-bearing tree gives Avatar’s Pandora a run for its money in the day-glo nature stakes and largely require the audience, like Sophie, to gawp at the visual splendour rendered by its crack vfx team and production designer Rick Carter.
Book fans will know that there’s a late regina ex machina in the form of the Queen of England (charmingly played by Penelope Wilton, aka Shaun of the Dead’s mum) and her staff (Rebecca Hall and Rafe Spall, both wasted), but this is really a two-hander between Sophie and the BFG, a country bumpkin with satellite-sized ears and a mangled vocabulary that provides much of the low-key verbal humour.Young Ruby Barnhill is a pleasant enough Sophie, but, as with his Oscar-winning turn in Spielberg’s previous film Bridge of Spies, it’s Mark Rylance who owns the film. That the motion-captured giant is clearly modeled on the actor’s features too conveys much of his idiosyncratic physicality and twinkling eyes.
It’s directly down to him that the ending brims with an emotion you barely suspected was there – rare for a filmmaker as sentimental as Spielberg, who has composer John Williams otherwise working overtime to wring out feelings that trickle rather than flood forth.
If there’s an overriding reason why the film never catches fire the way that the best of Spielberg’s family films do, it’s that he’s never really been that comfortable with broad humour. Exhibit A: 1979’s wartime farce 1941. When you’ve got a story involving seismic green “whizzpopping” (“flatulence” in the Queen’s English), you need someone who’s a natural at staging and embracing the excess, which Spielberg, for all his incredible skills, is not. The joyfully lunatic musical/slapstick opening to Temple of Doom is still far and away his best, totally off-the-wall sequence in movies; it would’ve been neat to have a little more of that here too.
