Curiosity Inc.

The Magical Faraway Tree was made and marketed on whimsy, and that’s a high-risk/high-reward maneuver. Sometimes we get The Sheep Detectives, and sometimes we get A Big Bold Beautiful Journey. And nobody should know that better than screenwriter/minor supporting actor Simon Farnaby, who previously wrote all three Paddington movies (Yay!) along with Christopher Robin (Meh.), and Wonka (Boo!).

Yeah, I was more than a bit hesitant about this one. But the summer movie season dropped off hard this year, so let’s see what we’ve got.

This is the story of the Thompsons, a humble family trying their best to carve out an honest life in London. Polly (Claire Foy) is the breadwinner, applying her skills in architecture and art toward designing new household appliances. Tim (Andrew Garfield) is the homemaker, painting and playing music while he raises the kids.

Unfortunately, Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy) is a self-absorbed teenager who could find a reason to be upset about literally anything, Joe (Phoenix Laroche) has a pathological addiction to his video games, and both of them talk about Wi-Fi like it’s oxygen. Their youngest (Fran, played by Billie Gadsdon) is the only remotely tolerable one, mostly because she doesn’t talk.

The plot gets going when Polly decides she would rather quit her job than be complicit in designing a fridge that records and reports sensitive data about unwitting families. (Though it’s Judi Dench voicing the fridge, so that’s nice.) The downside is that her family is now homeless and essentially penniless. Tim’s solution: Move the family back to the countryside where he grew up. They’ll renovate a nearby barn, grow enough tomatoes to make and sell Tim’s legendary tomato sauce (he has some vague Italian heritage that he may be lying or mistaken about), thus raising enough money to buy the farm outright.

I hasten to point out that Garfield’s ancestry has been extensively documented, and he has no Italian heritage whatsoever. Yet here he is, going through numerous scenes with a cartoonishly stereotyped Italian accent for the purpose of amusing his kids and insisting on some claim to Italian heritage that he can’t articulate with any consistency or detail. Even without any Italian heritage of my own, I found it deeply uncomfortable.

Back to the plot, there are a number of problems with this plan. You know, besides the obvious. For one thing, the barn is a fixer-upper that needs significant upgrades before it can even be habitable, much less a viable farm. And of course the kids would rather complain about the lack of electricity and online access, instead of doing anything constructive. Oh, and let’s not forget the tiny little detail that the family is broke, without any kind of seed money to jump-start a viable business, much less a profitable one.

Pretty much all they’ve got are Tim’s relentlessly optimistic can-do attitude, Polly’s architectural ingenuity, and whatever scraps the neighboring villagers are willing to donate. Oh, and there are also the magical neighbors living next door.

Yes, it’s common knowledge that this farmland borders a magical forest, supposedly home to various pixies and fairies and the like. After a chance encounter with the fairies, Fran is graciously invited to the eponymous Magical Faraway Tree, which is essentially a portal to the fairyland. In fact, the tree works as a kind of terminal, granting access to a number of different fantasylands (there’s a land made of candy, a land of spells, a land of birthday wishes, etc.) that rotate through on a daily basis.

Lots to unpack here.

First of all, even though the forest is widely reputed for its fairies, there are really only three worth mentioning. There’s Silky (Nicola Coughlan), the sweet and friendly fairy who takes it on herself to welcome our human characters and serve as their guide through the fairy world. There’s Moonface (Nonso Anozie), the proud and pompous humbug who insists on being the de facto leader of the fairies because he claims to be the best and smartest at literally everything despite all evidence to the contrary. And then we have Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), Moonface’s personal footman, who insists on wearing various sizes and shapes of saucepans all over his body. He’s inexplicably made it his whole identity, even as the noise makes him comically hard of hearing.

There are maybe three or four other fairies/pixies in the supporting cast, but it’s frankly pathetic how flat they are. The booby prize goes to Mr. Whatzisname (Oliver Chris), who can’t remember his own name. That’s it. That’s his entire character. He’s strictly a one-joke character, and the joke is too boring to be properly called as such.

The characters on the magical side of things are all woefully one-dimensional — except for those rare select few with the opportunity to get a second dimension — but the actors try and compensate for that by going as over-the-top hammy as possible. It doesn’t really work. It’s only Anozie and Coughlan who can leave a memorable impression through sheer force of charm. And then there’s Rebecca Ferguson, who briefly shows up to play an over-the-top archvillain. She turns in an aggressively hammy, forcefully bug-eyed, outrageously shrill performance like nothing I’ve seen since Anne Hathaway in The Witches (2020). Though at least Ferguson doesn’t get nearly as much screen time to wear out her welcome, so there’s that.

(Side note: In the original books by Enid Blyton, Ferguson’s character was named “Dame Slap”. In more recent reprints, after corporal punishment of children fell out of fashion, the character was rewritten into “Dame Snap”. I bring it up because the filmmakers went exceedingly far out of their way to write this name change and the reason for it directly into the script. That’s a joke in this movie, I’m dead serious.)

Yet for all the lack of nuance in the fairy characters and the lack of effort in the world-building, I was pleasantly astonished by the level of effort and nuance in the themes. At first glance, you’d expect these fantasylands to be nothing but candy and rainbows and good times all around, but that’s not what happens. As events unfold, the characters learn some harsh lessons about what to wish for, whom to trust, and when to let go before taking too much of a good thing. And those lessons are all so deceptively subtle, it’s not always easy to know where the trap is until it’s too late.

I might add that quite a few scenes with the fairies are undercut by a bittersweet inevitability. As much as these fairies may like these particular kids, it’s outright stated that these are not the first human children to visit the forest. Sooner or later (and it’ll be sooner than anyone wants to think about) there will come a day when these kids stop coming. They’ll forget all about the fairies and stop believing in magic, just like everyone does when they grow up. And even in the best case scenario, it’ll be because the kids have grown strong enough that magical friends are no longer needed. In the worst case scenario, it’ll be because the kids have grown into the kind of small-minded, self-centered, materialistic bullies who actively work to make the world less magical.

Ultimately, the Tree is only really important as a metaphor. Aside from a couple of wrinkles in the third act, these kids could’ve been making up their own stories out in the forest and the plot would’ve played out more or less the same. Because first and foremost, this is a movie about the power of imagination and positive thinking. Especially with regards to children, their capacity for wonder, and the importance of holding onto that as we grow up.

Which brings us back to the “real world” side of things. Jennifer Saunders briefly appears as Polly’s disapproving mother, a woman so hopelessly dependent on her money and status that she’s literally incapable of opening a physical envelope without assistance. Of course she’s appalled at the notion of her family living out in the sticks and working on some harebrained scheme to pay the bills with tomato sauce, but there’s a strong sense that she didn’t approve of her daughter when she was living in London and making legitimate money in the first place. Note how she barely even talks of lifting a finger to help her daughter and her grandchildren, yet she’ll fly her freaking helicopter all the way out to the British countryside just to chastise them.

While this particular character doesn’t get a whole lot of screentime or impact on the plot, she capably embodies the true antagonist of the film: The system. The very same system that forced Polly to make the impossible choice of putting her and her family into destitution, or enabling the violation of consumer privacy for countless families. And because she made the honorable choice, this family is no longer capable of affording the standards that “society” demands they have.

Thus the family succeeds by getting off the grid and playing a different game. Call them fools or vagrants or whatever, but the Thompsons are playing the cards they were dealt as best they can. Or rather, some of them are. Tim is doing his best to keep everyone’s spirits high, Polly does fantastic work when she gets up to speed, and Fran loves her new fairy neighbors, but then there’s the other two.

To be perfectly honest, I found Beth to be hopelessly insufferable through the first half of the film. Here we have a kid who is unshakably resolute in making herself and everyone around her hopelessly miserable. It doesn’t matter what she has to say or do or think, she will find some way to make everything about her and her ongoing quest to prove why everything around her sucks. Even her stated goal of getting back to the city makes no sense — we clearly see for ourselves that even with her precious Wi-Fi connection and her home back in London, she’s every bit as much a disconsolate, self-centered brat.

But then comes the good news: Beth does eventually suffer for all her faults. More importantly, she learns from them and grows from them. She gets to know the fairies who — unlike her other friends — will stand up for her and with her even when there’s no electricity. She sees firsthand what her parents go through to keep generating the electricity she’s always taken for granted. She sees the disastrous consequences of getting what she thought she wanted.

All of this leads up to the moment when it’s Beth who first steps up and rallies her siblings so they can go save the day. It’s a deeply satisfying development arc to watch. By comparison, Fran pretty much completes her development arc by the end of the first act, and Joe’s development arc is pretty much the same as Beth’s with a few crucial turning points omitted.

The Magical Faraway Tree can be cloying, twee, saccharine, juvenile, and absurdly heightened in portraying the two extremes of harsh reality and whimsical enchantment. But that sweet spot in the middle, when the film shows why the two sides need each other, is where this movie fires on all cylinders. For all its flaws, the movie works as a full-throated rejection of small-minded, cynical, materialist thinking. It encourages kids and adults of all ages to play and imagine and think beyond what anyone might think is possible. Even better, the film’s messages are all delivered by way of so many clever metaphors that it all hits so much harder.

Even when the characters are thin, the plot is predictable, the jokes run on for too long, and the world-building makes no sense, the film gets by with uncompromising commitment to the tone and themes. This won’t be the best family fantasy adventure we get this year (Seriously, if this movie turns out to be better than Wildwood, I might die of disappointment.), but I’ve definitely seen worse movies in this lane. (IF, anyone?)

This certainly isn’t “must see” material, but I’m comfortable recommending it. Especially for those with young children.

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