Friday, May 31, 2019

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013, PG)


I’ve been aware of this Jean-Pierre Jeunet film for quite a while, but it’s only recently that I’ve had an opportunity to see it.  While I wouldn’t put it on par with Jeunet’s French films, it’s still a rather lovely little curiosity that I enjoyed a lot (premise spoilers.)

10-year-old T.S. Spivet is a would-be Leonardo Da Vinci living on a farm in Montana.  A year ago, he took up the challenge of perpetual motion, and with his blueprints for an invention called the magnetic wheel, he’s achieved perhaps the closest mankind can currently come to such a machine.  When his invention earns him the prestigious Baird Award, T.S. leaves home and sets off on a cross-country trip to the Smithsonian (where, by the way, the unsuspecting academics don’t realize their big breakthrough was invented by a child,) riding the rails to collect his prize.

Like A Very Long Engagement, this film is based on a novel.  As such, it doesn’t always feel like a Jeunet film, although the director’s hand is very present in the whimsical production design and arresting cinematography (let loose in North America, Jeunet’s filmmaking offers up some stunning big-sky landscape porn.)  I’d say the story feels a bit more “directed” than Jeunet’s original pieces, which often revel in seemingly-haphazard events falling surprisingly into place at the last second.  This film is more straightforward, T.S.’s journey propelling us through the action and the family secrets in his past informing his character.

I really enjoy the character of T.S.  Although young Kyle Catlett doesn’t seem quite equal to the task of the brainy dialogue, he’s still a lot of fun, wonderfully eccentric and rootable.  I enjoy his machines, quirks, and analyses, and I like the ways in which he’s very clearly both a genius polymath and a 10-year-old boy.  I haven’t read the book the film is based, but I’m guessing that many of Jeunet’s idiosyncratic touches come through here; some of T.S.’s ruminations and obsessions seem very much up his alley.

My favorite part, though, is the story of T.S.’s unlikely parents.  Like T.S., I’m fascinated by what drew his entymologist mother and rancher father together (both played excellently by Helena Boham Carter and Battlestar Galactica’s Callum Keith Rennie.)  I love the section that features T.S. pondering this very question, giving us my favorite moment of the film:  T.S. noting how, despite the entirely different worlds they seem to inhabit, they brush hands as though they’re exchanging secret messages when they pass each other in the doorway.  Almost as interesting as their relationship with each other is the separate relationship each has with T.S.  His mother shares his scientific mind but doesn’t seem able to show him the warmth he needs as well.  Meanwhile, even though his father doesn’t express disapproval in him, T.S. can’t help but feel that he’ll never connect with his dad the way his rough ‘n’ tumble brother did (T.S. may be a genius, but it feels right that he only considers that he doesn’t measure up to his dad’s expectations, not that his salt-of-the-earth father might feel he doesn’t have enough to offer his brilliant son.)

Warnings

Thematic elements, some scary moments, and a lot of “don’t try this at home.”

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