Films like this are frustrating to write about, possibly even more so than films that are outright boring. Although weirdly enough, they’re both frustrating for the same reason: The challenge involved with writing about them in a way that’s worth reading. With boring films, it’s managing to get across how little of an impact it made on me as a viewer without resorting to just repeating the word ‘boring’ 500 times. With films like The Secret Garden, it’s figuring out how to explain that all the pieces for a satisfying movie are here, and it seems to have done what it set out to do… and yet somehow didn’t. Read on, and I’ll do my best to explain.
This is a family film in the loosest sense of the term, as the themes and emotional frequencies it taps into are pretty daunting for younger audiences, dealing a lot with grief, emotional detachment, and the lingering effects of disease and plague. I know I draw a lot of possibly unintentional parallels between a film and the real world at time of release, but… I keep hearing this voice in the back of my head insisting that that can’t just be a coincidence.
As a result, the film largely deals with emotional defence mechanisms relating to that kind of tragedy, where a person withdraws from the positive side of life in an attempt to protect themselves from the negative, knowing that accepting either means accepting the loss as factual reality. To that end, the titular Secret Garden is where all the positivity and joyousness of life has been separated from the coldness of the rest of life, shown as the estate that takes up the rest of the scenery in the story. It’s a decent idea, and one aided by the film’s visual aesthetic. The cold stillness of the estate is heavily contrasted with the CGI-boosted technicolour of the Garden, which certainly looks like a place with enough magic to heal the sick and injured.
However, while the theme lands on solid ground (and falls into the kind of sentiment I’d whole-hearted endorse with how bloody depressing the real world is at time of writing this), there’s unfortunately quite a bit here that saps away at its impact. The casting, for instance. The child actors here are operating at DEFCON Shrill for the majority of their screen time, meaning that Dixie Egerickx and Edan Hayhurst’s performances keep giving us far less appealing characters than are required to make this whole affair work. Even Colin Firth, for as little as we see of him, is too low-key to really sell his own contribution to the collective misery being felt.
There’s also how the script deals with the main plot points to do with Egerickx’ Mary, how she ended up at the estate, her connection to the Garden (along with Hayhurst’s Colin’s), and basically all the connective tissue for the larger statement about cutting yourself off emotionally from the rest of the world. I admittedly haven’t read the source material, and I get that this is a legacy remake, but the film basically takes it as a given that the audience is already aware of the story beforehand. It glides through an awful lot of what I presume to be the heavier points in the story, meaning that while they make themselves noticeable, they don’t land with the impact needed to carry the themes that string them together.
To a certain extent, I get why Harry Potter and Paddington producer David Heyman would tap this book for his next big-screen adaptation, as enough intriguing worth shines through to make sense of what someone else would get out of it. But unfortunately, all I got out of it was a film that looks quite nice and has some decent ideas, but felt too shallow to make full use of those ideas and make the visuals more than just eye candy. It’s as average as average gets for 2020.
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