"The Young And Prodigious T. S. Spivet"

If there’s one aspect of John Hughes’s films that has consistently influenced children’s films or films about children, it’s his tendency to flatter his young audience by writing highly intelligent yet misunderstood young protagonists and contrasting them with an adult world full of greed, selfishness and stupidity. It’s a simple, easy way to make kids feel important and special without really teaching them anything aside from accepting their family of lesser mortals.

At first I feared “The Young And Prodigious T. S. Spivet” was headed in that direction. Its story about a boy genius (Kyle Catlett), whose love of science – inherited from his entomologist mother (the great Helena Bonham Carter) – is at odds with the more physical interests of his twin brother (Jakob Davies) and their stoic cowboy father (Callum Keith Rennie) as well as his shallow whiny sister (Niamh Wilson), could easily have lent itself to a condescending comparison between enlightened sophistication and country ignorance. It looked like it was going to be the classic tried-and-true story of the misunderstood kid who is neglected by one parent and/or misunderstood by the other and who has to fool adults to get his way – in the latter case by claiming his perpetual motion machine as his father’s invention and pretending to speak for him on the phone. I expected the young boy to achieve his goal – namely to leave his rural background behind for Washington D. C. to collect the Baird Prize for his invention – and subsequently return to a more appreciative family. And those things do indeed happen, but not quite in the traditional fashion.

The Spivet family is haunted by tragedy, you see. While the opening 10 minutes are cleverly edited to hint at something not being quite right while still introducing every family member as alive, we eventually find out that T. S.’s aforementioned twin brother Layton has been dead for a year. It is this element that gives the screenplay its opportunity to subvert the formula. It casts T. S.’s flight from home and dysfunctional Relationship with his family in a different light; indeed the very home is cast in a different light. It ceases to be a predictable “quirky” sitcom premise and becomes more akin to a modern biblical Genesis, in which Adam and Eve are a strangely mismatched couple with vastly different interests and personalities, Abel’s death is a tragic accident and Cain’s exile is self-imposed.

Through the eyes of Frenchman Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Eden takes the form of a peaceful Americana, isolated from the modern world and resembling an idyllic island in a sea of grass and corn. It is quite far removed from the negative stereotypes many Europeans such as myself tend to associate with rural America. Jeunet does away with the yellow –orange–and–brown tint that dominated his previous films’ colour schemes and replaces it with a much wider palette that breathes new life into his images. It recalls the South Dakota of Terrence Malick’s “Badlands”. Yet Jeunet’s Americana is surprisingly more optimistic than the poisonous beauty of Malick’s masterpiece. When T. S. finds refuge in a wagon carrying a mobile home promising its prospective owner the “taste of true American freedom”, it is both an ironic observation on the double-nature of T. S.’s self-sought freedom – free from the constraints of home but forced to hide from authorities as a runaway – and a constant reminder of the value of what he is running away from.

One recurring motif of Jeunet’s previous films – most notably the overrated “Le Fabuleux Destin D’Amélie Poulain” and the unfairly dismissed “Micmacs À Tire-Larigot” – is the use of comic book-like thought bubbles that pop out to depict something that the character is imagining, something that is happening simultaneously or a flashback. Either way, the character dominates most of the screen, with the thought bubble occupying a small portion of it. It was cute in Jeunet’s previous films but the 3D gives it new life, putting the thought bubble in the foreground while the person imagining it is less clear to the mind’s eye without losing their presence completely. I have never been a fan of 3D. Even the much-praised 3D in the decent-but-overrated “Life Of Pi” was distracting at best. Here, however, Jeunet takes inspiration from pop-up books – images of which open all three segments of the film – and thus taps into his audience’s collective memories by bringing back unconscious childhood sensations of discovery. While it does not convince me of 3D’s future, it is refreshing to see it used in a way that enhances the film’s experience and serves a purpose – namely to connect the audience with its protagonist’s mindset – rather than a gimmick.

“The Young And Prodigious T. S. Spivet” does not always balance its themes of coping with death and being misunderstood quite perfectly. A potentially interesting plot point arises when T. S. reads his mother’s stolen diary and finds out that she herself had doubts whether her husband really loved her or not, but it is never brought up again. When T. S. finally makes it to Washington, the screenplay shifts to safer territory, as T. S. uses his acceptance speech to finally spill the beans about his brother’s death (set to Clint Mansell’s “Leaving Earth” from the outstanding video game “Mass Effect 3”) and is subsequently exploited by the Smithsonian Institute’s greedy undersecretary Mrs. Jibsen (Judy Davis). The expected satirical truisms about the media and its sensationalism ensue. But the main point – that T. S. and his family were each coping with Layton’s death in their own way and neither were truly acknowledging it – remains unbroken.