Steven Spielberg’s Roald Dahl film is beautifully lit, tenderly played by Mark Rylance and Ruby Barnhill, and short of anything to do between its lovely opening and its lively last act. Children under ten will be enchanted; the adults beside them may drift.
Steven Spielberg has filmed Roald Dahl’s The BFG with a script by Melissa Mathison, who wrote E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial for him in 1982, the same year Dahl’s book came out. It is a soft, patient, handsome 117 minutes about an orphan and a giant who collects dreams, and it has two great assets, Mark Rylance’s face and Rylance’s voice. It also has an hour in the middle where the story stops and the film simply potters. We liked it, in the way one likes a kind relative who talks too long.
Rylance plays the giant through motion capture, and the technology, for once, has given rather than taken. The eyes are his, wet and anxious, and the enormous ears move a fraction before he speaks, as if they had heard the thought coming. He does Dahl’s mangled English, human beans and snozzcumbers and whizzpopping, without ever winking at it, in the tone of a man who has never had anyone to correct him. Ruby Barnhill’s Sophie is small, bespectacled and bossy, and she is not cute, which is the right choice; she tells a giant off for his grammar. When the two of them are alone in his cave, the film is at its best.
The opening is the other high point. Janusz Kamiński shoots London in blue-black with pools of yellow lamplight, and the giant flattens himself into a shadow or stands still against a wall while a drunk staggers past, and for ten minutes we were entirely happy. Rick Carter and Robert Stromberg’s Giant Country is green hills and a cave lined with hundreds of glass jars, each holding a dream that flickers and hums. Dream Country, where the giant goes fishing with a net, is lit from underneath, a dark lake with coloured lights moving in it like fish. We sat forward for that sequence and said nothing, and the child two seats along did the same. John Williams’s score hovers rather than swells there, and it is the right decision.
Then the film has to find something to happen, and it does not. Jemaine Clement and Bill Hader give the big giants loud, lumpen voices, and they are louts rather than monsters. Dahl’s giants ate children, and the reader knew it in the stomach; Spielberg’s giants are said to eat children, and we never once believed a child was in danger. So Sophie hides under things, the giants sniff about, she hides under something else, and Michael Kahn cuts it all at the pace of a bedtime story being read to someone already asleep. Somewhere in that stretch we looked at our watch, and were surprised and a little sad to be doing so in a Spielberg film about a child and a creature.
The last act moves somewhere grand, and we will leave it there. It brings in Penelope Wilton as the Queen, Rebecca Hall as her maid Mary and Rafe Spall as Mr. Tibbs, and it wakes the film up. Wilton plays the monarch as a sensible woman coping with an implausible morning, and gets the biggest laughs in the picture without appearing to try. Joanna Johnston’s costumes do a quiet joke here, the giant’s leather waistcoat and long coat against a room of gilt and braid. There is also a joke about digestion that runs for a good deal longer than it needs to, and the children in the audience loved every second of it.
The comparison with E.T. is unavoidable and unkind. Mathison gave Elliott a divorced mother, a school, a brother who teased him and a house full of noise, so that a boy hiding an alien had a whole life to lose. Sophie has an orphanage, dispatched in five minutes, and nothing waiting at home; the film has taken the stakes away before it starts. Dahl’s cruelty has been sanded down too, as several critics noticed, and what is left is sweetness, which is pleasant and does not carry a middle hour.
See it with a child, if you have one to hand, because it was made for them and they will not notice the slack. Watch it at home, where the dream lake still glows and the long stretch in the cave can be forgiven with a cup of tea. Rylance is worth the evening on his own. He plays an enormous, lonely, courteous person, and we believed in him more than in anything he was asked to do.
