Simon Farnaby’s adaptation of Enid Blyton is bright, kind and often funny, with a cast who know exactly what sort of film they are in. It is also so determined that nothing should worry anyone that not much happens for long.
Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree books, the first of them published in 1939, have almost no plot. Children climb a tree, a land arrives at the top, they look round it, and they come home for tea. Simon Farnaby, who co-wrote Paddington 2, has been asked to find a film in that, and Ben Gregor directs what he found. Their answer is to give the Thompson children an ordinary modern family, phones and all, and to make the tree the place where none of that counts. It is a sensible answer. It also leaves the film with 110 minutes to fill and nothing much pressing on anyone, and it never quite solves that.
The children are good. Billie Gadsdon, as Fran, carries more of the film than anyone and does it without the pushed brightness child leads are usually asked for; she looks at things before she reacts to them. Delilah Bennett-Cardy and Phoenix Laroche, as Beth and Joe, are given the jobs of doubting and sulking and do them with some grace. Andrew Garfield plays their father Tim as a man whose cheerfulness is running slightly ahead of his circumstances, and Claire Foy, as Polly, gets the harder part, the parent who has to be sensible, and gets laughs from it anyway. Jennifer Saunders turns up as Grandma and does exactly what you would hire Jennifer Saunders to do.
Up the tree the casting is broader and the film is happier. Nicola Coughlan’s Silky is warm and slightly harassed, a fairy who has plainly dealt with children before. Nonso Anozie’s Moonface is a big gentle presence under a round pale face, and he finds the right pitch, never quite as excited as the children want him to be. Dustin Demri-Burns clanks about as the Saucepan Man, hung with pans by the costume designer Ann Maskrey, and mishears everything on cue. We laughed more than we expected to, and the laugh that caught us out was Jessica Gunning’s Dame Washalot, who empties her tub down the trunk with the calm of someone who has been doing it for decades and sees no reason to stop. Rebecca Ferguson’s Dame Snap, all teeth and hairpins, is the nearest thing to a threat, and she is on screen for about as long as a threat in a U certificate is allowed to be.
Alexandra Walker has built the tree as a thing that looks built: painted bark, doors on hinges, a slide that is plainly a slide. That is the right decision for Blyton, whose worlds were always nursery furniture rather than cathedrals. Zac Nicholson lights all of it in full sun, every colour turned up, no shadow anywhere, and for an hour this is lovely. After an hour it becomes the problem. Nothing is ever dim enough to be frightening, and a tree whose lands drift away without warning ought to be a little frightening, or nobody minds when one drifts. Isabella Summers’s score is quick and chiming and tells us to be delighted a beat before we have decided.
Gary Dollner cuts the visits to the lands as sketches, one after another, and a sketch ends when the joke does. So the film stops and starts, and each stop lets a little air out. Somewhere around the seventy-minute mark we noticed we had not once worried whether anyone would get down the tree, and that the film had arranged things so we never would. We were not bored, exactly. We were comfortable, and comfortable is a low ambition for a film about a tree that touches other worlds.
Paddington 2 had the same kindness and the same care for its jokes, and it also had a plot, a stolen book and a prison and a man who wanted something. Farnaby knows how this is done, and here he has chosen not to do it, or the books would not let him. Whichever it was, the people in the tree are in a better film than the people in the house, and the house gets more of the running time.
Take children under eight and they will be happy for the full 110 minutes; it carries a U and earns it. Adults get Foy, Saunders and Gunning, and a pleasant hour and three-quarters of sitting in sunshine with nothing at stake.
