The Secret Garden (2020)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

It's the same story we all know, adapted by a brilliant writer in a completely rote way, and I just cannot figure out why anyone thought this movie would be a good idea. There have been so many adaptations of Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel in the last century, most of which are indistinguishable from each other. Writer Jack Thorne's ability to craft something fresh and interesting out of the familiar (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, The Aeronauts, Radioactive, Wonder, His Dark Materials) here manifests as something completely beyond the scope of the source material. That is to say, in a now-cliché story about overcoming grief by tending the garden of life, this ill-intentioned adaptation turns the titular garden into an actual magical place.

It's a Narnia -- or, perhaps, Terabithia -- for orphaned Mary Lennox and her new friends Dickon and Colin. As they enter its vine-covered walls, the light changes and colors enhance, and before we can say "CGI" they're running through the paths as impossibly large flowers burst into bloom around them. I half-expected the petals to have faces and burst into song, a la Wonderland, so strongly was the drug-induced aura of the scene. Why work on interpersonal skills, proper British etiquette in manicured lawns, or even dealing with grief when you can be so easily distracted by fae robins leading you away from your troubles. Even when the dog is injured, it's the garden that miraculously heals it, right before our eyes. Any sense of wonder or mystery is hamstringed by the film's indulgence of pretty but vapid animation. 

Even the reliable Colin Firth and Julie Walters are given next-to-nothing to do, as director Marc Munden obsessively follows the children around. If they aren't frolicking through yellow and green woodlands, they're sneaking through Archibald Craven's Gothic manor, so thickly atmospheric it feels ripped from a different movie altogether. Whereas other versions lean into the human tragedies of this story, allowing us to really understand the pain and torment these lonely adults suffer, this movie forces Firth to gaze out from sunken eyes in a pallid face, trying desperately to Act, giving us the impression of an old man in the throes of bereavement after his late wife's lengthy illness.

Much as it does with the dog, the garden magically helps Colin, Craven's bedridden son, to walk. While this is perhaps a more ambiguous development, the precedent has already been set by the time Mary and Dickon spirit her cousin to the garden. Instead of allowing these characters real, dynamic growth, the movie denies both children and adults the ability to cultivate affection, putting them through alternating scenes of self-torment, indignation, and escape. And if you think I'm being too harsh, take a look at the almost camp quality of the climax, when -- spoiler alert -- Craven "accidentally" lights his own house on fire. In the (lack of) ensuing chaos, he tries to find his son, who is of course in the garden and not in the house; when Mary leads him to the garden to see Colin walking, the movie skips any articulate resolution or reconciliation between the two and assumes, through visual shorthand, that we understand their relationship is suddenly cured. Another magic trick of the garden? Who cares?

I do not understand why any studio would greenlight another production of The Secret Garden if it is not to finally adapt the musical to screen. Nobody wants yet another child-focused "drama" of the same story.