There’s too much going on here. While I find it somewhat fascinating that a story this simple can touch on so many different topics, that fascination turns into gawking rather quickly at how, by some bizarre anti-miracle, none of it ends up fitting together in a satisfying way.
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.
