Tuck Everlasting (2002) Alexis Bledel, William Hurt, Sissy Spacek, Jonathan Jackson, Scott Bairstow, Ben Kingsley, Amy Irving.
** of ****
I've always had a soft spot for stories about immortals living amongst mortals. Tolkien's Elves, Zelazney's Princes of Amber, Heinlein's Methuselahs, Moorcock's Eternal Champion, Pratchett's Magpyr family, Thorton Wilder's Antrobus family.
Somehow I missed Natalie Babbitt's novel Tuck Everlasting and the 1980 movie adaptation, so it was with few expectations that we all settled into our theater seats one recent Saturday afternoon to see the latest film by that name.
Tuck Everlasting is beautifully photographed. The colors are rich, the detail immense, the cinematography usually effective. Director Jay Russell's only fault is a tendency to overuse slo-mo.
As you probably know, the story is about the Tuck family -- middle-aged Angus and Mae and their two grown sons Jesse and Miles, who accidentally discover the fountain of... well, not youth, but life (apparently) everlasting. The lives of the Tucks are presented through the eyes of a neighbor girl who stumbles on their secret and gradually falls in love with Jesse.
This was my first exposure to the story, and something immediately nagged at me -- With the possible exception of Miles, none of the Tucks had grown or changed at all during their 100+ years on Earth. The Tucks don't move or react or reason like people with a century of life-experience. Angus and Mae still have heavy accents. Jesse appears to be no more sophisticated than any 17 year old who's traveled a bit. Only Miles seems to have gone through any life-changing experiences at all, and seems perpetually stuck in suicidal mourning over a family lost decades ago.
I eventually realized that portraying the Tucks as lacking in growth was intentional -- that it went along with the theme that people who had drunk from the magic spring are forever "stuck", physically, spiritually, emotionally, in whatever developmental stage they occupied at the time.
Well hell, if that's immortality, I might think twice about joining them.
...and of course, this is the theme of the film -- what use immortality if it condemns you to be a "rock besides the stream", always the same identical person in all aspects, whilst life flows past you, making no impression?
In this way the story cheats a little, as it winds out to it's inevitable conclusion, as it first tantalizes you with immortality, and then spends the rest of the film relentlessly demonstrating that immortality sucks. I think the film would have been more interesting had the issue not been so black-and-white.
Jesse is obviously meant to be the central character, but the older brother Miles was more interesting to me. Suicidally depressed but unable to die, Miles spends his hopeless existence as a foot soldier in the world's wars, irresistibly drawn to experiences that horrify him. It's a classic tragedy of which I wish we had seen more.
The dialog was probably the film's worst feature. Stilted, unrealistic, it probably reads better than it sounds. I suspect that someone who has read the novel would recognize huge swatches of dialog, word-for-word, but that's not necessarily the best way to bring a novel to the big screen.
Actors dealt with their "literary" lines in different ways. William Hurt tears through his long expositions like he has to go to the bathroom really bad. Kingsley tries to break up his long paragraphs by pausing to gesture or adopt a different facial expression every other line. Others deal with their dialog in less interesting ways.
All in all, I guess Tuck Everlasting was a mixed bag. Pretty to look at, less pretty to listen to, with an interesting premise but an ending telegraphed from a light-year away. A reasonable cinematic experience if you go in not expecting a great deal. Two stars out of four.
Ron
http://roc85.home.attbi.com
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