Movie Review of “James and
the Giant Peach”
from Eskimo 14
Page One Two
[Three]
Director Henry
Selick uses a mixture of live action and animation to
mark his story off into the traditional three acts of a
movie. The purely animated section occupies the middle
while the first and third acts consist of mostly live
action, though it would be misleading to call them
realistic. In all matters, from sets and costumes to
acting and cinematography, the first and third acts are
highly stylized in a manner that we’ve come to
recognize as the style of Tim
Burton (producer here): a mingling of grand guignol and
fairy tale. (Director Henry Selick had worked with
Burton before on “The Nightmare Before
Christmas”.) The middle of the middle act has a
nightmare sequence that combines live and animated
technique for the film’s most surreal and
frightening section, the realistic part feeling like
it’s imprisoned in the fantastic. The final part
of the final act combines them again, but this time
with a feeling of relaxed summer warmth, the realistic
in harmonious control of the fantastic.
The film is based on
a novella by Roald Dahl, and it’s hard to go
wrong with that kind of base. He is one of those
writers of children’s fiction, like George
MacDonald, who gives us a full portion of drama, not a
child’s portion. It is useful to remember that he
also wrote plenty of adult fiction (as did MacDonald),
dark little gems which came to cinematic life as
episodes for “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”
and other suspense showcases of the 1950s and 1960s. As
he did in “Willie Wonka & the Chocolate
Factory” (1971) and “The Witches”
(1990), Dahl fashions triumph for his heroes out of
hard materials. We get a sense of the same thing here
within the first few minutes as we see James basking in
an idyllic childhood, flanked by loving parents. Second
after blowing out the candles on his seventh birthday
cake, a cloud darkens the scene and we are informed in
a voice-over:
Then one day a terrible thing
happened. An angry rhinoceros appeared out of nowhere
and gobbled up his poor mother and father. Their
troubles, if they had any at all, were over in
thirty-five seconds flat. But James’ troubles
were just beginning.
Enter Aunts Sponge
and Spiker, whose mission in life is to make
James’ life miserable. As played by Miriam
Margolyes and Joanna Lumley, they are deliciously
detestable. They starve James and put him to work like
a scullery maid. Cinderella has nothing on James. The
turning point comes when James befriends a spider who
has wandered into this house of horrors. This makes use
of a classic fairy tale trope: the downtrodden hero
forgets his own suffering as he finds a creature
who’s even weaker and worse off than himself and
lavishes on it a compassion which he himself has never
received. As he sings the movie’s first musical
number (delightfully composed by Randy Newman), he
makes a drawing of himself and folds it into a little
paper cube. By suspending underneath it a tiny lit
candle (the last candle saved from that last happy
birthday cake) he creates a miniature hot air balloon
and launches it out the window of his garret into the
night: a gift to the darkness. In the morning he is
roused to action in order to protect the spider from
his hysterical insectiphobic aunts. Running from the
house with his precious cargo, he trips and falls. The
spider scurries off safely but when James rights
himself he finds himself face to face with a strange
old man (played by Pete Postlethwaite, who adds a
strong and welcome spice to every dish he’s
thrown into). This figure embodies another classic
fairy tale trope, the magic guide who is a bit
off-putting or unprepossessing. He gives James his
little balloon back, now full of magic green seeds
which he must guard carefully, for the old man explains
that whatever they get into they transform. Again,
James trips and falls, spilling his treasure. The seeds
all hop away but one gets into a dead peach tree in the
backyard and impregnates it. The tree bears fruit
instantly. The peach grows and grows until it’s
the size of a small house. But the aunts steal the
peach from James and turn it into a tawdry tourist
attraction. Will things never go his way?
Finally,
half-starved, James takes a bite of the peach, unaware
that one of the magic green seeds had just hopped into
that part of the fruit. From then on, nothing can stop
him. Tunneling into the peach, he is transformed into
an animated character and finds himself surrounded by
an assortment of friendly insects, including the spider
(voiced by Susan Sarandon as a sultry vamp whose smoky mittel-European
alto, like Madeline Kahn’s Lili Von Shtupp in
“Blazing Saddles”, recalls Marlene
Dietrich). Simon Callow plays the grasshopper as a
proper English gentleman. Jane Leeves gives us a
genteel lower middle class English lady … bug.
Richard Dreyfuss’s centipede has a Brooklyn
accent and attitude. A broad-voweled Yorkshire
earthworm (David Thewlis) and a dainty glowworm
(Margolyes again) round out the crew. The centipede
bites through the peach’s stem, which has
tethered it to the dead tree like a rope to a rotten
wharf, setting the peach in motion. It rolls down the
hill, gathering speed, and plunges over the cliff into
the ocean. Thus begins James’ voyage to the New
World, the vacation trip promised him by his parents
before they died. The Big Peach is headed for the Big
Apple.
Ogres are always
with us, it seems, merely changing costumes from time
to time. The next one that comes along takes the shape
of a marvelous mechanical shark bent on devouring the
juicy orange vessel. James sees that their only hope is
to take flight – by harnessing a flock of
seagulls with the silk cords spun by the spider. Thus,
with this new variation on the image of flight, his
gift of the paper balloon comes back to him again.
After more
adventures and adversities, obstacles and escapes,
James makes it to New York only to find that the
dreaded aunts have followed him. Escape is not an
option this time. Only confrontation will do. But now,
thanks to the confidence he has gained from the
accomplishments of his voyage and the support of his
new-found family, he can stand up to them and face them
down.
JUST before they get to New York
there’s a scene in the peach balloon at night
when it feels as if we have arrived at the still point
of the turning world. James and his friends celebrate
their closeness with the show’s final number,
“Family,” singing and dancing under the
stars, and what stars they are! It reminds you that the
most conspicuous element on a sea voyage is not the sea
but the sky – especially the night sky with its
richly detailed architecture of flaming, wheeling
stars. It’s an architecture that is only fully
visible away from the light pollution – and
safety – of the cities. It reminded me of a
similar scene in “Joe Versus the Volcano”
(1990), another movie about a hero who undertakes a
mythical voyage, crossing a perilous sea to escape
bondage. Joe, delirious from thirst on a makeshift raft
under a surreally huge moon, is ravished by a humility
that gives him a moment of ecstatic union with the
divine.
Archetypal symbolism
amplifies the import of the tunnel through which James
enters and exits the peach. It is an obvious relative
of the birth canal itself, making the peach a new womb
in which he will gestate in a dream life for the length
of his sea voyage so that he can be reborn as a person
whose powers of dreaming and action are integrated.
This kind of
symbolism gives a somber substratum to the story, whose
sheer beauty and inventive zeal might otherwise obscure
the hard and unchanging psychological truths that exist
at its core like the rough stone that holds the
sweetness of the peach together. The stone is all
that’s left of the giant peach after the fruit is
eaten, and it is set up as a monument and home for
James in Central Park.
As a reward to those
audience members who had the good manners to sit
through the final credits (which is the only way a film
can let its cast and crew take their bows), the film
gives us a little coda, a one-minute movie of a kid
playing an old-fashioned arcade game called Spike the
Aunts, whose object is to maneuver a small mechanical
rhino into place so it can gore the two aunts, who are
suspended from a cable, spinning helplessly about. The
lemmings who rushed out of the theater don’t
deserve to get treats like this, so maybe there’s
some accidental justice in the world after all.
