Score: 4 / 5
Netflix offers us, yet again, a stunningly beautiful movie musical in the form of Matilda, the long-loved Roald Dahl story adapted to a stage musical in 2011. This adaptation, directed and co-written by Matthew Warchus (Pride), with the same team who created the stage production, is about as bonkers as you'd expect from a Roald Dahl story. Personally, I've never much liked Dahl or Matilda, but the songs by Tim Minchin are rather wonderful in this adaptation. This film -- which, from what I've gathered, is fairly faithful to the original stage version -- is a nonstop technicolored fever dream of energy and awe. And that seems to be completely appropriate for its subject matter.
Matilda, played by Alisha Weir, is a clever and lonely young girl who loves to read to learn but also to escape from her family life. Her narcissistic, selfish, and stupid parents (played hilariously by Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough) finally send her to school at the prompting of others, but warn the headmistress that she is a troublemaker. At school, Matilda excels at her studies but has more trouble navigating other schoolchildren. The headmistress, Miss Agatha Trunchbull (played by the incomparable Emma Thompson under heavy prosthetics) is a terror to her --and indeed the other children -- as she torments children for pleasure, although Matilda in particular is aided a bit by her lovely teacher, Miss Honey (a pitch-perfect and arrestingly lovely Lashana Lynch). During her tribulations at school, Matilda discovers that her mind also harbors another secret: a surprise skill for telekinesis and light telepathy.
For someone like me, who doesn't particularly like the source material, mileage on this movie will vary. I found myself drifting between engrossing curiosity and vague annoyance with each complex character and each outlandish plot development. But most of that is directed at Dahl, not this film. Dahl's stories are usually aimed at and enjoyed by children although he was reportedly a exceptionally unpleasant person; perhaps this air of authentic emotional weight and raw, almost cruel observations of the real world are why his tales remain classics. There isn't really sentimental fantasy involved, and usually in fact it's all a bit macabre. I just don't find much humor in surreal depictions of brutish women stretching a boy's ears like putty or throwing pigtailed girls over garden walls like Olympic hammers (although her characterization here is fascinating as a Soviet-style commandant). I also don't find much humor in the vicious pranks Matilda plays on her father, deserved as they may be for the abusive man in question.
But Warchus's direction, Tat Radcliffe's kinetic cinematography, and especially Tim Minchin's songs weave a dazzling spell of infectious fun. I was completely blown away by the lyrical structure of "School Song" in particular with its endlessly smart use of the alphabet as the students singing it disclose the horrors in store at school to Matilda. Gorgeous, candy-colored production design heightens the proceedings to a level of whimsical fantasy directly in opposition to the pure content, not unlike what Lemony Snicket (and filmmakers who have adapted his work) did with his Series of Unfortunate Events. The Dickensian school notwithstanding, the film keeps things a little too bright and clean; even the remarkably acrobatic choreography is edited to be in perfect time, tightening things up in an almost cartoonish way that highlights the fantasy aspect of Matilda's awakening to the real world.
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