Seriously – at this point – The Weinsteins, in particular Harvey, need to be stopped. Someone has to drive over to their offices and put a banana in the tail pipe or something because I’m done with their asinine shenanigans. One of their latest casualties: Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s glorious and never released in the United States family film The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet. I call it a family film because at its heart, it’s all about family, but this being a Jeunet picture, you know you’re in for something subversive and all together unique from frame one and this overwhelmingly ravishing movie is no exception. Taking his storybook filmmaking aesthetic to new and boldly imaginative heights, this feels like an amazing mixer of his already fanciful storytelling techniques with nods to Wes Anderson, classic American iconography, bits of the whimsical spirit of Michel Gondry, along with a dollop of Spielbergian sentimentality that’s a perfect fit for the tonally wild final result. I simply can’t understand the fascination that the Weinfucks, oh I’m sorry, Weinsteins have with continually meddling with major movies from major filmmaking talents (James Gray, Bong Joon-Ho, and Wong Kar-wai are some recent directors who have battled it out with the legendary “producers.”) It’s almost as if they go out of their way to buy everything up and then just dump or bury it so that nothing can compete against their new QT film or whatever British prestige picture they have up their sleeve in any given year. It’s getting really, really tired.
Based on the book by Reif Larsen, the epic yet intimate narrative involves a 10 year old science prodigy in the making named T.S. Spivet (the incredible Kyle Catlett making his film debut, and having a TON asked of him as a performer). He lives on a gorgeous, Babe-style farm in Montana, and he’s obsessed with maps and inventions and figuring out the practicality of everything around him. His eccentric mother (Helena Bonham Carter, looking uncharacteristically beautiful yet still full of her trademark quirk) is obsessed with beetles and bugs; his father, the perfectly cast Callum Keith Rennie, is a “cowboy born 100 years too late;” and his 14 year old sister has aspirations of becoming Miss America but isn’t allowed to have a phone in her room. And then there’s the matter of T.S.’s twin brother Layton, who has tragically died in a gun accident, an accident that T.S. feels partly responsible for. Then, his life is changed one day when the Smithsonian calls, telling him that he’s won the ultra-prestigious Baird award, as he’s seemingly invented the world’s first perpetual motion machine. So what’s an intrepid kid living in Montana to do when nobody around him truly understands his numerous mental gifts? He does what any forward thinking young chap would do – he sets off by himself for Washington, D.C., hopping aboard freight trains, hitching rides with tractor trailer truck drivers, and using anyone and anything to his advantage in any possible way.
That’s all I’ll allow for the plot, because like every film that Jeunet has crafted, there are constant surprises in store, with his amazing sense of visual wit and overwhelming attention to detail within his mise-en-scene being almost second to none in my estimation. Shot after shot, the film looks like an utter treasure, with Thomas Hardmeier’s elegant and honeyed widescreen cinematography popping with vibrant color and depth of field, with something always interesting to look at in all areas of the frame. Jeunet is a grab-bag guy, a man in love with the endless possibilities of cinema, and as usual, his obscene production design (handled by Aline Bonetto) is stuffed with endless bits of visual information that both inform the story and boost the atmosphere. And then there’s the craft, DIY-inspired special effects and flights of fancy that amp up the pleasure-zone factors; it was filmed in 3-D which must’ve been a total treat to experience. This film was NEVER released in ANY fashion in the United States. Fuck you, Harvey Weinstein. Fuck you. The Cinema Godz cast shame upon you and your company. It should be considered a CRIME AGAINST CINEMA to get a film this wonderful and unique all the way to the end line and then not have it get a chance to see the light of day in a country where there would have been plenty of people to enjoy it. The only way that this movie can be seen is if you have a Region Free Blu-ray player, or if you feel like downloading it online illegally. I don’t do that stuff, and normally I’m against that practice, but in this case, I encourage everyone to do what they can to see this masterful piece of moviemaking.
Podcasting Them Softly 