The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet

Even seasoned reviewers will tell you, in confidence, that there are some films which should not be reviewed by conventional means. This is one of them.

I am guessing I have seen several dozen films that try in their own fashion to capture the essence, the nub, of what it is like to be a child in a world of adults.

This one succeeds and does so brilliantly.

It is not merely that writer/director Jean-Pierre Jeunet is a craftsman of the highest order - I would happily stand in line to see his next film, whatever it may be -- or that the actors (including Helena Carter) are pitch perfect, it is the sum total of the experience that just grabs you from the first scene and holds you until the end.

Highly recommended.

What a surprise to me- I was expecting another European artsy movie that does not go anywhere. I am European and generally sick of this kind of movies especially from France that bore me to tears. Instead I saw an entertaining movie, full of wonderful filmmaking, touching story and interesting characters. The story is told with an incredible focus on details and beautiful imagery. This is definitely an emotional story carried by kid actors that could have gone terribly wrong. For my taste Mr. Jeunet found a very tasteful way to direct the cast through the potential pitfalls of the story. The story is out there in a fantasy world combined with National Geographic Imagery- great combination. I am sure not for everyone but it worked for me. Chapeau monsieur Jeunet.

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2014):

This is the new film from the French Terry Gilliam, Jean-Pierre Jeunet. You may best know him as the director of Amelie, City of the Lost Children and Micmacs. This time, we have a sweeter and simpler affair: a young prodigy in Montana, the titular Spivet, has invented a 'perpetual motion machine' thereby solving an enigma that has baffled scientist. The discovery is so hot that it even attracts the attention of the Smithsonian institute, who wish to present the boy with an award, unaware of his real age. So, leaving home and his oddball family behind, T.S embarks on a journey across America to receive his prize.

The Short answer: It's really, really good! The Long? Well, where to start? Well given Jeunet pedigree, the visuals are up first, in all their vibrant, almost Technicolor-esque splendour. What's more, this is quite possibly the best use of 3D I have ever seen in a film. The depth of field is phenomenal, and really adds to the storybook feeling of the whole movie. It's sort of like a giant pop up book, which is fitting as that's how we transition between the different parts of the story. Whether it be out on the Montana ranch, looking out of a train or even in the Smithsonian itself, there is always something coming to the fore or floating out, and it's great fun.

Of course, there are other areas. The cast is top notch, with a pretty solid youngster as our lead. He captures the quirks and brainpower of our inventive young lead, alternately able to sell inspiration, determination and even fear a few times, reminding us T.S, for all his brilliance, is still a child. In supporting roles we have the likes of Helena Bonham Carter as his bug-studying mother, Callum Keith Rennie as his cowboy pop, and even Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon as a lively hobo T.S meets on his travels. This is just a shortlist of the people here, but every one does well and their own vibrance and sort of exuberance contrasts nicely with T.S's very straight forward, matter of fact behaviour and logic.

However, all this is but dressing without a decent script here, and well, we have a fine one. It's undeniably Euro-quirk, despite being a Canadian co-production, with a lot of visual gags and little sprinkles of off-quilter and slightly dark scenarios that are played with a slightly humorous bend (not many movies can make people shooting themselves, a cowboy with a lick fetish and even mourning trauma somewhat amusing, last I checked). However, amidst the silliness, there is a good deal of heart. For all his ingenuity, the film very much still presents T.S as a kid; he makes mistakes, he gets scared he misses his family as he goes on his adventure. The film wisely doesn't make him invulnerably just because he's our lead. What's more, there is a strong element here about dealing with death and letting go concerning a tragedy in the Spivet family, and while at first is somewhat there for amusement, the film does take it more seriously as it progresses, and once again, shows how people would react under that circumstance: some bottle it in, some cry and some regret and take blame. For a film with such a bright colour palette, it can get very dark and touchy a handful of times, and it's all the better for it.

Naturally, how much oddball quirk you can take will affect your enjoyment, and there are a few times where the pacing does slow down a little more than needed. Regardless, if you're burnt out by X Men and Edge of Tomorrow, and need something smaller and more out there, give this a shot. It may even leave you a little teary eyed at points, but regardless, if you can get to it, check this film out. It's inventive, touching and refreshingly with a few surprises. Can't ask for more than that.

Only a director with the creativity and imagination of Jean-Pierre Jeunet would attempt to bring to the big screen in English the best-selling novel by Reif Larsen "The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet". The book, described by author Stephen King as a combination of "MarkTwain, Thomas Pynchon and Little Miss Sunshine", is illustrated with charts, lists, sketches and maps to help recount the adventures of the quirky, gifted 12-year-old boy of the book's title . Jeunet has faithfully reproduced the visual elements of the novel to recreate the offbeat world of T.S Spivet and the use of a 3D format is perfectly suited to breathing life into T.S.'s illustrations which Jeunet's does by drawing on his trademark mix of poetry and fantasy. But the plot does not lift from the page and the young boy's eventful journey seems flat and doggedly two-dimensional.

The adventure starts off promisingly enough. T.S.Spivet (Kyle Catlett) lives on a farm in the 'Big Sky Country' of Montana with his amateur entomologist mother (Helena Bonham Carter), his cowboy father (Callum Keith Rennie) and elder sister (Niamh Wilson). A phone call to the ranch from the prestigious Smithsonian Institute in Washington informs the young Spivet that he has won a prize for one of his inventions. Since the death of his twin brother in a shooting accident, Spivet's mother and father have sidelined the surviving son. Feeling neglected and un-loved, T.S. decides to travel on his own to Washington to accept his prize. The journey takes him across America on a freight train and into a series of encounters with a gallery of colourful characters.

While the scenes in Montana are a triumph to Jeunet's bold, sweeping breadth of vision, once Spivet hops on the train, the action, conversely begins to falter. The characters he meets could have come straight from a cartoon strip – ageing sailor Two Clouds (Dominique Pinon) is a dead ringer for Popeye – and they add little or nothing to the narrative or the tone of the film.

As the lead actor, Catlett carries a lot of responsibility for one so young. No one can deny he is as cute as a button – with his oversized trousers and constant puzzled look – but he lacks the range of emotions needed to create real empathy. This may explain why a film about grief remains oddly unmoving until a a scene towards the film's finale which seems unashamedly designed to pull the heart strings. This latest Jeunet is undoubtedly a glorious visual treat, but it lacks the magic and mystery of 'Amélie' his most successful film to date. I

One might want to call this inevitable: that Jean-Pierre Jeunet, film's high priest of wild imagination, king of the bizarre and quirky, cinema's greatest child would end up making a film with a child protagonist. Jeunet found that protagonist in T.S. Spivet, the title character of Reif Larsen's best-selling novel about a boy burning with a passion for science, a keen observer of life with a strong will to leave his mark on the world and a dark secret. And even more so, he found him in Kyle Catlett, a small, frail blonde with piercing blue eyes, hesitant enthusiasm, an awake yet guarded mind, an infectious smile that is never sure of itself. For Catlett, Jeunet made the role younger, turning the book's twelve-year-old genius into an even more unlikely ten-year old through whose eyes he makes us see the world for those miraculous, mesmerizing, blissful 105 minutes.

And what a set of eyes they are: warm and loving, yet at the same time distant and objective, T.S. deconstructs the world in order to return it to order. As so often with Jeunet, he makes us look at the ordinary in an entirely new way. His hero's scientific glance transforms the everyday into miracles, makes the normal appear bizarre and vice versa. It is a look Jeunet had perfected in his masterpiece Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, better known shortly as Amélie. It is a world inhabited by quirky yet mostly lovable people: T.S.'s harassed mother (Helena Bonham Carter) who is obsessed with classifying insects, his quiet cowboy father Callum Keith Rennie, his entertainment addicted sister Gracie (Niamh Wilson). Jeunet paints them close to the caricaturesque, often adding an absurdist touch, a little too much color to make them appear brighter and clearer than life, only enhancing their humanity by turning the screw a little further.

Jeunet lets his hero narrate the story: how he, after his twin brother's fatal accident, sets out to improve the world through science, how he sets out to make his way to Washington, DC in order to pick up a prestigious science award. T.S.'s off voice provides distance, context, irony, humor – but above all imagination. Visually, Jeunet indulges in small imaginative transgressions of realism, giving the film a playful, exploratory feel that perfectly matches his protagonist. The borders between the real and the imagined are fluent, their realms overlapping rather than separated. The wideness of rural Montana is too beautiful to be true, it may be more a country of the mind, but for Jeunet this doesn't make it less real. For him, imagination is the true life force, what one can dream of must be true. So one might wonder that T.S. keeps encountering good and friendly and helpful people, meets little conflict and arrives safely and almost smoothly in Washington as if he was dreaming it. And maybe he is, maybe we are.

Just like every dream this one has to end. And so it does and the film fizzles out in a mixture of flashy media satire, crude anti-modernism and sentimental celebration of family values. The simple, somewhat quirky yet honest and lovable people on the one side, the falseness of the polished capitalist façade on the other. T.S., of course, returns into the loving arms of his family and escapes the cruel materialism of a world governed by fame, power and money. No doubt the end weakens the overall effect of the film – but cannot break it. For the power of human imagination it celebrates and visualizes, the playful anarchism it embodies, the shameless naïve optimism it upholds survive the crudeness and the one-dimensional caricature it ends up embracing. As the voice of T.S. Spivet prevails so does his spirit that calls on us to learn a new way of looking at world. Through observing eyes which believe that anything is possible as long as we can dream it. Imagine that.