(courtesy IMP Awards)
It’s a tale as old as, well, not time exactly, but certainly since the day movies arrived just over a century ago and began adapting books into films, setting in train a titanic battle between those who believe solely in the purity of the written word and those who revel in the idea of a story being as alive in one medium as it is in another.
Proof that this battle is kicking along with the same vigour it has always possessed came for this reviewer at least in the form of a spirited Facebook group condemnation of The Magic Faraway Tree, an adaptation of Enid Blyton’s classic escapist tale of three children who discovered that a sprawling tree in the woods near their rural home is home to idiosyncratically magical characters and a portal to lands beyond everyday look and understanding.
The true believers of the Enid Blyton fan community are entitled of course to love her written stories and to defend them with ceaseless devotion; that is, after all, why the group, in part, exists.
But what was interesting was how ferocious their condemnation of this movie, from the writer of the sublimely wonderful writer of the Wonka and Paddington 2 movies, was how eager, sight unseen, they were to excoriate an adaptation simply because it exists.
Now, in all fairness, this reviewer, hasn’t read the actual book in some 50 years or so, and so recollection of the actual narrative and characters is a little hazy, and so I cannot speak with any surety of how great an adaptation of Enid Blyton’s classic tale (which begat, to use an old timey-wimey word, a series of books) the film The Magic Faraway Tree actually is.
Even if my memory was razor sharp, or I had just read the book a day ago, and honestly I was tempted but excavating it from my considerable collection of my childhood books is not a task for the fainthearted, I am not entirely sure I would have sat there comparing book and film, storyline element and character actions beat by beat.
The fact of the matter is that books and movies always diverge and there is so such thing as an adaptation, not matter how faithful, that will ever accurately portray a book precisely because so much has to be changed or left out to get lots of words onto an expansive but inevitably more finite medium of film.
So, this review of The Magic Faraway Tree, and yes, admittedly a lot of words have been employed to effectively start this review half way through its allotted word count, is simply going to talk about why watching this film felt like stepping into the wonder and happiness of losing myself in the sort of storytelling that whisks you as a child from the everyday.
For many children, the everyday is a terrible, or at least disconcerting place to be, and escape is a must, a necessity that lifts the burden at least for a little while – I was bullied intensely as a child and books saved me more than once – and that’s certainly true of Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), Joe (Phoenix Laroche) and Frannie (Billie Gadsdon) Thompson who find themselves living in an undeveloped barn out in the English countryside when their fridge-designing mother Polly (Claire Foy) finds herself out of a job because of a principled stand against tech invasiveness.
With husband Tim (Andrew Garfield) a stay-at-home dad, and no other income stream to hand – the family apparently have no savings at all and so fleeing London for a cheap living option on a farm is their only way forward, despite Polly’s mum, played with devilishly pompous comically Big Bad vibes by Jennifer Saunders, being obscenely wealthy – the family end up miles away from friends and family and having to start all over again with a plan to grow tomatoes and make a sauce that will apparently net them 20,000 Pounds in just a few months.
On paper, it’s a farcically silly premise but remember that this is a children’s story at heart, and we read and watch them, even if they’re the same story, because they don’t exist in a world that pays heed to common sense and ordinary outcomes, and their move to the countryside brings them into contact with the magical denizens of the titular tree, including know-it-all Moonface (Nonso Anozie), irrepressibly upbeat Silky (Nicola Coughlan), goofily clanky The Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns) and Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning) who is the one who keeps watch on which land is locked into the top of the tree on which day.
Without giving too much away, and honestly much of the fun is losing yourself in not only the technicolour lands the children go to – Frannie gets their first and believes it all implicitly carrying uncomplicated Joe and grumpily disbelieving Beth right along with her – The Magic Faraway Tree becomes a way for the children to not only process their considerable feelings at being uprooted from the only home they have ever known but to find an accommodation of the warmest and loveliest kind with their new living reality where all that tomato sauce production is off to a promising start, though without any certainty it will lead where kooky but loving dreamer thinks it will.
The story has of course been updated with talk of Wi-Fi and Beth on group Zoom chats with her friends, but rather happily not at the expense of the wholly wondrous idea that trenchant life issues, the kind that make things terrifying and miserable, especially if you’re a child, can be solved with sprinklings of magic and candy-coloured escapism and glorious reality-defying adventures.
And it’s that kind of meaningful whimsicality that promises even the most horrible of things can find a happy resolve in the most unusual of ways, and the lands the kids journey to are unusual is all kinds of ways even if they do bear the hallmarks of some very human traits, that prevails in The Magic Faraway Tree and give it a sense of transporting you far away, even deep in the depths of timeworn adulthood, from the onerous and pressingly exhausting world outside.
While the plot is predictable in one sense, that’s a good thing because it means you can lose yourself, even decades after childhood, in the lighter-than-air idea that though your immediate reality might grind under the gears of bleak, unfixable normalcy, that somewhere out there is a magical tree full of make believe but very real characters who simply want to be known and loved (this leads to an especially poignant scene near the end of the film and who can take your life and give it just the shot of eccentric happiness and change it needs to become something if not entirely new, then much better than it was, leaving you feeling a whole lot better after The Magic Faraway Tree than you were when you entered the cinema.