By The Plaid Adder

Comments: plaidder@mindspring.com

You remember Madeline, from the little old house all covered in vines? Twelve little girls in two straight lines? Miss Clavel? Appendicitis? Genevieve the dog? OK, if this isn't ringing a bell right now then you never read the Madeline books, which chronicle the adventures of a small yet plucky little girl who lives in Paris at a school run by nuns or in this case one nun, the tall yet plucky Miss Clavel. I have to say that although I liked them well enough, the Madeline books never played as large a role in my preschool psyche as, say, Winnie the Pooh, Wind in the Willows or the Miss Bianca series. (Anyone but me remember the Miss Bianca series?) Rhyming verse, as Liza pointed out, does limit one's scope for character development, and the artwork, while inimitable and charming, was also extremely 2-dimensional with a somewhat strange color scheme that was too heavy on the blue-green end. But, and this is the really neat thing, they have taken these sweet but not grippingly fabulous children's books and turned them into a really good children's movie, and this is something to be excited about.

Usually it works in the other direction, viz., this spring's adaptation of The Wind in the Willows starring Terry Jones as Mr. Toad and Eric Idle as Ratty. The film worked great for about 20 minutes and then suddenly it became an unrecognizable monstrosity. This isn't just because they didn't "stick to the book" in terms of plot; it's because the whole point of WITW is the characterization (nothing much happens, after all) and the folks behind this movie were unable to come up with a plot that would both drive something as long as a movie and allow the characters to develop along normal lines. So instead they took the Toad/Weasels conflict from the very end of WITW and made the plot out of that, which involved a lot of action-adventure stuff including a giant mincing machine swiped straight out of Wallace and Gromit, the dynamiting of Toad Hall, and all kind of other grievous violations of WTIW's universe, characters, and spirit. But I digress.

No, I don't, actually, because my point was that although Madeline includes a lot of plot elements that never appeared in the story that's all right because they mesh well enough with the original. The out-of-nowhere action-adventure plot--in this case it involves Pepito, the bad-boy motorbike-driving son of the Spanish ambassador who lives in the house next door to Madeline's school, and the villainous tutor who plans to abduct him and hold him for ransom--is sort of gently zany in that kid's-adventure way, allowing character development for Madeline and Miss Clavel that actually builds on what's developed in the books isntead of riding over it with a giant steamroller. What's even better is that this plot is developed slowly at leisurely intervals which are filled up with day-in-the-life stuff about the convent, which is what the books were really all about, and which is all really engaging and funny without being gross, cloyingly cute, or stupid.

The kids are, I will admit, all extremely cute. However, the producers made the wise decision to cast mostly brunettes, which saves them from an embarras de Shirley Temple, the only blond being Vicki the snotty rich kid, and the only redhead being Madeline. But the best thing about this movie, really, is that the kids are believable (within the rules governing Madeline's universe) and natural, and for that reason are really fun to watch. For instance, in the first little episode involving Madeline's appendicitis, there's a great scene where Madeline is being rushed downstairs to the hospital and she's asking for her hat (they always wear these little round straw hats when they leave the school...) and the kids, who are all sort of panicky and want to help but can't really, run up to the dormitory to find the missing hat. So while nine kids are running around ad-libbing various hat-finding activities you have Madeline's very earnest and timid best friend Aggie urgently exhorting everyone to "Think like a hat!" while Chantal the obligatory kid with glasses (who, contrary to American kid's-movie cliches, is actually not the brains of this operation) obediently stands there meditating on hatness and repeating, "I'm a hat...I'm a hat...I'm a hat..." until she's inspired to look under one of the beds and finds it, whereupon all 11 of them go stampeding down the stairs with the hat, tossing it to Miss Clavel through the closing doors of the ambulance a la Indiana Jones. There's another great scene where, after Madeline leads a vegetarian uprising one evening at dinner, the kids get hungry later that night and sneak down into the kitchen, where an orderly spy mission degenerates into a sort of mini-carnival when they come across not only cheese, food, etc. but Helene the cook's undies, which are hanging up to dry. The kids, who are of course all prepubescent, are both appalled and fascinated by Helen's full-figured-woman bra; but whereas in an American movie the advent of a bra is usually the sign that things are about to take a turn for the worse, here it turned out to be really charming and funny.

For us, though, the really great thing about this movie was Frances McDormand, who we know and love from Fargo, as Miss Clavel. She's really good at being both repressed and expressive at the same time, and had a lot more gravitas than, say, Julie Andrews does in The Sound of Music, in terms of being believable as a woman who could bend 12 girls under the age of 12 to her iron will without totally crushing their little independent spirits. I guess I liked her partly because in general American movies do a really bad job of representing educators. Either we're all stuffy, pedantic, neurotic bastards who need to lighten up, or we're freewheeling let's-introduce-everyone-to-the-beauty-of-Shakespeare-by-reading-it-very-dramatically Dead Poets' Society types with a lot of charisma but no pedagogical approach to speak of. While it is true that most of Madeline happens outside the classroom, they did a good job of showing Miss Clavel as someone who was both committed to making sure the kids learned things (including decorum and deportment) and committed to making sure they were enjoying life, school uniforms and all. And they also did a good job of representing her relationship to the kids and her special bond with Madeline, who unlike the others is an orphan.

So, all of that makes it a good movie for adults; what makes it an especially good kid's movie is that it moves fast enough to be engaging without moving so fast as to be overwhelming, and also that it manages to be dramatic and scary without introducing any real violence. Nobody in the movie gets shot, nothing explodes, nobody falls into a giant mincing machine, and even the kidnappers aren't especially fearsome (they are, after all, members of a traveling clown troupe called The Idiots). Where the drama comes from is the stuff that children really do wonder and worry about: death (Lady Covington, the school's benefactress, passes on early in the movie, shortly after Madeline visits her in the hospital), illness, and the threat of change (the real threat driving the movie's plot is that Lord Covington is trying to sell the little old house, which will mean closing the school and separating all the kids from each other and Miss Clavel). So it's real, without being aggressive and assaulting.

There are of course problems with it--the highly implausible ending, for instance, has a lethal sap content; the selling-the-house plot includes portrayals of ambassadorial couples from various third-world countries (they appear to be living on Embassy Row) which, while not glaringly offensive, are nevertheless a little annoying (i.e., the Indian couple spends some time talking about how the house has good karma, etc.), and there is this puzzling indecision about whether people in this movie are speaking French or English. Also, the producers indulge in an almost Xena-like disregard for historical consistency; the costumes and sets all appear to date from the 50s or 60s, but the dialogue has a number of very '90s touches (the vegetarianism thread, for instance, and the fact that the last couple that comes to buy the house is the ambassador of Uzbekistan and her husband). Ah well. It's still a good way to spend an evening, especially if you have kids, or if you like remembering what it was like to be a 10-year-old girl with an active imagination.