[star rating=”3.5″]
THIS BEAUTIFUL FANTASTIC. Written and directed by Simon Aboud with Jessica Brown Findlay, Andrew Scott, Jeremy Irvine and Tom Wilkinson.
MEGAN FURNISS reviews
This Beautiful Fantastic almost succeeds in being beautiful and fantastic, but just doesn’t quite make it. It is almost a fabulously strange, fantastical story of an unusual friendship between a young, obsessive compulsive wannabe writer orphan person and the curmudgeonly old man who lives next door to her. She learns from him, and he ends up learning from her, etc, and it is a bit of a happily ever after, but not even quite that.
Simon Aboud writes and directs; and he is possibly a little too close to the story to see that it isn’t really enough to hang a beautifully styled hat on. Jessica Brown Findlay is very beautiful, and excellent at long stares and meaningful looks, as the lead Bella Brown, and Tom Wilkinson, who is such a favourite of mine (he was the extraordinary gay man who goes to India to find his childhood sweetheart in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel) is perfectly perfect as the grumpy old neighbour who becomes a melting sweetie, and everyone else is also really good at their parts, but not much happens and it’s all a little predictable.
Not wholly committed …
Style-wise the movie sits between the really strange and wonderful worlds of Tim Burton and Wes Anderson, and a more muted but perfectly executed children’s fairy tale. It has that strange sense of being a children’s movie for adults too, or maybe even the other way around; an adult movie for children. Either way, it doesn’t wholly commit to anything, and that’s the problem.
Some of the moments are really delicious, and there is a tickle of comedy, a smear of sentimentality, a whisper of fantasy, and a sliver of romance, but nothing ever really settles. The two slightly villainish characters are mildly bad, and the untamed garden easy to tame, after a brief spell of resistance. A redeeming feature of the film is that it is British, and so it avoids the more obvious and sentimental, but it just isn’t enough for the viewer to care about.
This movie wears all the right clothes and plays all the right music, but nobody really does the dance. Oh, and then there was the Gaelic. What was that all about?
If you have an hour and a half to spare, there are worse ways to pass the time, but I wouldn’t go out of my way for this one.
WS
