In THE YOUNG & PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET, the director of Delicatessen does Disney. Well, sort of, maybe.
Don’t recall anyone in a Disney film dropping the F bomb! Still THE YOUNG & PRODIGIOUS T.S.SPIVET is very much a Disney echo being an amalgamation of Adventure, Frontier, Tomorrow and Fantasy, the lands inspired by Walt, and given full imaginative rein here.
T.S. Spivet lives on a remote ranch in Montana with his parents, his sister Gracie and his brother Layton. A gifted child with a passion for science, he has invented a perpetual motion machine, for which he has been awarded the prestigious Baird Prize by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. He leaves a note for his family and hops a freight train to make his way across the United States and receive his prize. But no one there suspects that the lucky winner is a ten-year-old child with a very dark secret.
THE YOUNG & PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET is Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s sunniest film since Amelie but retains his trade mark bitter sweet view of the world and his penchant for the mechanical.
Jeunet’s decision to make the picture in 3D “because it’s inherent to the project. In his book, Reif Larsen accompanies the text with small drawings in the margins: maps, sketches, city maps, portraits, notes… It was normal for them to figure in the film and the best way to do that was obviously 3D. It was a way to make those drawings float through the theatre, to leap off the screen the way audiences love to see! But just like in Amélie, the special effects are there to serve the narrative.”
Hard to say who is most ’normal’ in the Spivet family, with a son so far ahead of his age, a father born a hundred years too late, a sister obsessed with red carpets, and a mother searching the insect world for the equivalent of the unicorn.
Kyle Catlett is quite a casting coup as the titular character, a quirky kid who eschews cute for a much more questing quality, a cumulative of prodigious, precocious, tenacious and endearing.
His entomologist mum is played with signature eccentricity by Helena Bonham Carter. She is much better theorising over thorax than daily domesticity as her steadily mounting toasted toasters attests.
The whole show is almost stolen by Judy Davis’ turn as the Smithsonian undersecretary, Jibsen, a master class in comic timing and characterisation. Her dropping of the F bomb the most articulated direct hit in her arsenal of verbal artillery, a targeted delivery that is devastatingly hilarious.
Films about kids are usually kids pictures. This could be, but it’s not the cloying, overhyped type rolled out at school holidays. It’s way better. And still should appeal to kids and adults alike.