Synopsis: A modern family moves to the remote English countryside, where the children discover a magical tree inhabited by a colorful cast of eccentric characters who help them reconnect with their parents and rediscover their family bond.
Stars: Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Nonso Anozie, Nicola Coughlan, Jessica Gunning, Jennifer Saunders, Rebecca Ferguson
Director: Ben Gregor
Rated: PG
Running Length: 110 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: A nearly century-old Enid Blyton classic arrives as a handmade fantasy with three superb child performances and a screen-time lesson that never turns into a lecture. Best family ticket of the month.
The Magic Faraway Tree Review: Blyton Was Right All Along
Enid Blyton wrote more than 700 books. They’ve sold north of 600 million copies in over 90 languages. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) lists her as the most translated children’s author on earth. In Britain her titles still move faster than one copy every two minutes. She’s been dead since 1968, and she’s still outselling most living novelists. The Enchanted Wood arrived in 1939 and The Magic Faraway Tree in 1943. Both were written for kids living through rationing and air raids who needed someplace to go that wasn’t bleak and ominous.
Which is a long way of saying that purists should be warned. The Magic Faraway Tree is a thoroughly modern adaptation of source material closing in on its hundredth birthday. Ben Gregor’s film reaches American screens this weekend after opening in the UK back in March where it pulled in close to $20 million. British families already know what it does with her. It modernizes nearly everything: the setting, the parents, the jobs, the devices in the children’s hands. What it doesn’t touch is Blyton’s actual argument. Turn children loose and trust them to find things on their own. Update the circumstances, leave the instinct alone.
A Barn, a Silent Girl, and a Ladder in the Clouds
Polly Thompson (Claire Foy, First Man) is an inventor who’s just finished a smart fridge for her employer. Then she learns they slipped hidden cameras into her design to spy on the people who buy it, and she quits on the spot. Her husband Tim (Andrew Garfield, tick, tick…Boom!) treats the wreckage as an opening. He’s wanted a countryside life and a homegrown tomato sauce business for years, and suddenly there’s nothing in the way.
The property they buy turns out to be a ramshackle barn with no electricity and no plumbing. The farmers who sold it to them, decent people about the whole thing, give the family a few weeks to make it habitable before the sale completes. Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), the eldest, wants cell reception and her old life back badly enough to write to her grandmother in London asking for a rescue. Joe (Phoenix Laroche) is calculating how many hours of battery he has left. Fran (Billie Gadsdon), the youngest, hasn’t spoken in years.
Then Fran returns a dropped purse to a fairy named Silky (Nicola Coughlan, Barbie), says thank you out loud, and gets an invitation to tea. The address is a tree. At the top of it is a ladder, and above the ladder is a different world every single day. The Land of Goodies one morning, somewhere else the next. The lands rotate whether you’re ready or not, and anyone still up there when it turns is stuck until it comes back around.
Three Siblings Who Actually Seem Related
Gregor said from the start that bad kids meant a bad film. The casting search was exhaustive enough to justify the anxiety. And it’s good news for audience that he got it right three times.
Bennett-Cardy is perfectly prickly as a teenager doing hard time in the countryside, all gloomy clothing and withering silence. Thankfully, she never tips into the standard sullen-teen note that would’ve flattened the part. Laroche is very funny as a middle child working out that no electricity means his handhelds are on a countdown. His blank thousand-yard stare into the middle distance is a small masterpiece of doing nothing. Gadsdon has the hardest job. Fran is our way in, and she has to register genuine wonder without turning precocious. She lands it. These three feel like siblings who’ve been annoying each other for a decade, and no amount of rehearsal usually buys you that.
Garfield and Foy, reunited nine years after Breathe (seek that one out, it’s an under-the-radar gem), play parents who are hands-off without being negligent. They’re also smart enough to hand the movie to the children. Coughlan’s Silky runs on pure delight. Nonso Anozie (Cinderella) is sneaky as Moonface, blustering early and revealing himself slowly. Jessica Gunning (Baby Reindeer & The Christophers) comes out hot as Dame Washalot, running the ladder to the lands like mission control.
Jennifer Saunders (Minions) is terrifically deadpan as the grandmother and she’s the closest thing to an actual villain but never really a serious threat to anyone. Listen for who voices the smart fridge early on, it’s a gift of casting. The one miss is Rebecca Ferguson (Dune), whose Dame Snap arrives late as the heavy of the fantasy and can’t make the dent she should. That’s not entirely her doing, as Ferguson is usually the high point of anything she signs on to. The film has bigger fish to fry by then, with the farm on the line and the children’s future up for discussion, and Ferguson’s ornery headmistress has to wait her turn.
Blytopia, Built by Hand
Gregor coined a word for the look of this thing, and it stuck: Blytopia. Production designer Alexandra Walker set one rule. The story’s contemporary, but everything on screen should look like it came from somewhere between 1920 and 1970. That gives the film a dreamy, unpinned quality without stranding it in a particular decade.
More impressive is how much of it’s real. In an era when nearly every fantasy film this size is shot against a blue screen, this one was built the old-fashioned way. Craftspeople spent months making individual mushrooms for the enchanted wood, each one different. The Faraway Tree is an oak, gnarly and old, with actual foxgloves at its base. Every plant and bird in the woods is native to Britain.
The sweets hanging in the Land of Goodies are real sweets, and the cast admitted to eating them. It puts Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Room to shame. Ann Maskrey’s costumes hide storytelling in details nobody will consciously clock. One example: resin buttons cut to look like boiled sweets and engineering Saucepan Man’s pots not to clatter so the dialogue could be recorded clean.
Moonface, in the books, has a, you guessed it, giant moon for a face. In live action that’d read as either creepy or cartoonish, in a McDonald’s Mac Tonight sort of way. Gregor instead built the moon as an enormous white crescent hairpiece so Anozie could act with his own face. It works, and it nicely sums up the way this production compromised without caving. Ruslan Borysov’s in-house visual effects team then stitched it all together. The digital work blends with the practical work instead of replacing it.
Zac Nicholson’s cinematography is unfussy. Gary Dollner’s editing is patient enough that your eyes aren’t darting around during the effects sequences. It moves like those old Disney live-action pictures that would happily spend ten minutes introducing a character before anything happened. Blyton trusted kids to go and find things. Eighty-seven years later, so does this movie. Isabella Summers, of Florence and the Machine, wrote the score and an original song Garfield lends his soothing voice to.
Touch Grass, Says the 1943 Children’s Book
Simon Farnaby‘s script is the reason none of this plays like a sermon. He keeps undercutting his own sincerity with jokes. He lets the technology be genuinely useful when the children need it instead of casting the devices as villains. Nobody on screen ever stops to announce what the movie is about. The message is in there, and it isn’t subtle. Put the phone down. Go outside. Touch grass. Blyton wrote these books decades before anyone had a device to be addicted to. The fit is convenient enough that it should collapse. Farnaby keeps it standing by refusing to say it out loud.
The Magic Faraway Tree is a candy-coated fantasy that melts fast and does mild damage to your enamel. It’s also the rare family film that doesn’t end at the merchandise aisle. Most movies this size send children home wanting something. This one sends them home wanting to go outside, checking every oak on the drive for a door.
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