A story about grief and how the imagination is a very powerful thing.
When I set out to watch this movie I wasn’t sure what to expect. I hadn’t seen many trailers and the ones I had seen had me believing it was different, more like the Iron giant meets Harry Potter but I was surprised by this movie and could see myself watching it again. Also, if anyone is interested the movie I’d most compare it to now is the Bridge to Terabithia.
First off, Liam Neeson brings his gravelly tones to the only role worthy of them…a giant sentient yew tree. But yeah joking aside he managed to sound stern and yet warmly, which is just what our main character needed. Also the sickly mother is played by felicity Jones or some might recognize her as Jyn Erso from the standalone Star Wars movie Rogue One. Also, for reasons I can’t gather Sigourney Weaver was in this playing an emotionally distant grandmother to the main character who spoke in stilted sentences for reasons I can only assume had to do with the fact she couldn’t do an English accent. And finally playing the main character Connor O’Malley we have Lewis MacDougall a young Scottish actor who doesn’t have great many acting credits…I imagine that’ll change after this…but does incredibly well at bringing a detached and damaged feel to the movie.
Like I said this film took me by surprise I expected the big old walking talking tree would dispense wisdom (he does in a way) and help a lonely young boy out instead the movie teases the line as to whether the Monster is real…and it’s certainly real to Connor. Before making it seem far more likely that Connor is cracking under the strain of bullies and his mother dying.
Whether or not Liam Neeson’s character is real he does in his own way help Connor. He comes at the same time each night to tell Connor a story, which at the time seems to just screw with you but become clearer with hindsight to be about the duality of human nature and how people can be selfish or want something that isn’t nice or good but still be considered a good person. In fact I’d say that these moments where the tree recounts these fables are some of the best sequences in a movie I’ve seen in a long time. The sequences themselves are also artfully animated as water colours, which connects them to Connor more personally because he’s an artist and his mother also wanted to be an artist before getting sick and before having a child. Honestly, even if you think the entire movie is crap if you love fantasy and little animations then give those bits a watch.
Something I think films and TV do too much now is follow the when it rains it pours ideology. We see it a lot in sitcoms surprising where one character…very occasionally two will serve as the dumping point for everyone’s insult and anything bad can and always will happen to them. How this connects to the film however, is that on top of potentially moving in with his strict controlling grandmother and his wayward dad coming back into the picture and the sick mum Connor also gets his ass kicked at school. Now I’ve been bullied but they get all up in his grill with it. The sad fact about bullying in real life…in most cases is that you’re not special, you’re not a target you just happen to be near someone with anger issues and or personal demons who see you as weak enough to get away with it. It’s often you get your own personal bully and they never have a reason.
They do use it well though. It becomes clear after two explosive confrontations that he wants to be punished and so it now explains how in his own small way he was inviting these beatings. He could have avoided the bullies but he kept staring at them so they could turn his inward pain outward and also so that he could be punished for what the movie calls ‘his truth’
Now, I’ve touched on a lot of the key elements of the movie but I hope beyond the peripheral I’ve not spoiled anything and I’m not going to either if I can avoid it. But I really can’t recommend this movie enough. It has the right balance of fantasy and feeling, and it uses the fantasy elements in such a real way. It uses them as we always have to cope…whether it be with the mundane or the heartbreaking people have always used fantasy as their respite from reality and this movie latches onto that and pumps out a thought provoking film that’s made its way into my top ten.
That being said the acting wasn’t perfect, the grandmother, as I said, just felt awkward and only part of that was by design. I feel they only hired Weaver because she’s a big name when a much better alternative could be found. Also at times I didn’t love MacDougall’s acting it just felt rough in the same way that many child actors do. So taking that into account I’m going to give this movie a 3/5 and suggest you watch it as soon as you can because it’s well worth it.
Video courtesy of: Entertainment On UK
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Storyteller made of branch, twig and leaf
Helps a young boy come to terms with his grief
Life is not a fairy tale. We all suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And none of us get out alive. Or as Tony Kebbel as the nameless father of thirteen-year-old Conor (an astonishing performance by Lewis MacDougall) says, we all live “messily” rather than happily ever after. A fact Conor knows only too well for his mother Lizzie (Felicity Jones) is in the final stages of a terminal illness. “Too old to be a kid and too young to be a man,” he struggles to makes sense of his feelings and is awoken each night by a terrifying nightmare in which he is left clinging to his mother’s wrists as she dangles off the edge of a precipice.
Then, just like Ebenezer Scrooge who was visited by the ghost of Jacob Marley and the spirits of Christmas past, present and future, Conor is visited four times by a Liam Neeson-voiced yew tree aka the eponymous Monster which rips its roots out of a hilltop graveyard and transforms into a humanoid mass of gnarled branches and spindly twigs whose bark (pardon the pun) is worse than his bite. “I will shake your walls until you wake,” the Monster tells him. “And then I will tell you three stories.” On his final visit, the roles are to be reversed and Conor is to tell him a story. “And it will be the truth,” the Monster bellows. The truth that he hides. His nightmare.
The enigmatic allegories or as Conor puts it “idiotic stories that make no sense” about giants and dragons and wicked queens and invisible men as told through a series of brilliant watercolour illustrations are interspersed by domestic developments in his life. School bullies, spearheaded by James Melville as Harry, pick on him for living in a dream world until they realise that, actually, he wants to be beaten up and punished for the contradictory thoughts he has about his mother’s fate. His estranged father pays a flying visit from America to effectively say goodbye to his former wife. And his distant grandmother (Sigourney Weaver) makes unwelcome arrangements for his care which go down like a lead balloon.
Written by Patrick Ness and based on his Young Adult novel of the same name which was inspired by an idea from the late British writer Siobhan Dowd (whom he said, “had the characters, a premise, and a beginning. What she didn’t have, unfortunately, was time.”), A Monster Calls is a story about grief and letting go. In particular, a child’s grief for a parent. Though Conor’s admission “I want it to be over”, and the guilt he felt in wishing his mother would die so that they could both be relieved of their pain and he could go on to live “messily” ever after, is something which everyone can identify with, regardless of age.
Lewis MacDougall in only his second film after his debut as Nibs in Pan is, as I said, astonishing. And credit must go to Spanish director J. A. Boyana (The Orphanage, The Impossible) for drawing out such a complex, subtle and honest performance from the young Scottish actor. Though the casting of Sigourney Weaver is questionable. Not just for her accent which is forced but forgivable, but mainly because of her fame which detracts from what is an intimate study of grief as portrayed by a relative newcomer. Giving new meaning to her line, “We’re not the most natural fit, are we?” Thankfully, the detraction is minimal. And the moral of this fine film hits home: “In the end, it’s not important what you think. It’s important what you do.”
Verdict: 4/5