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It’s got to get dark before it gets light

By Bob Strauss
STAFF REPORTER
Friday, Apr 04, 2008, Page 16

Hogsqueal helps Jared Grace spy on the wicked creatures trying to get their hands on Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You in The Spiderwick Chronicles. PHOTO: COURTESY OF UIP

Ny times news service, Los Angeles

The Spiderwick Chronicles is the latest series of children’s fantasy books to make it to the big screen.

The movie version, however, isn’t exactly kid stuff.

Packed with goblins, ogres, trolls and the like, the film condenses four of DiTerlizzi and Holly Black’s five books into an exciting — but often frightening and kind of gory — war between a troubled young family and evil forces from the Unseen World.

“This film is quite scary, and I think kids will like that,” says Freddie Highmore, the 16-year-old English actor who plays the twin American brothers, Jared and Simon Grace, who find their new country home besieged by monsters. “They like getting scared to death.”

Probably true. Their parents, maybe not so much. Nevertheless, making the PG-rated film as mature as possible — in thematic as well as graphic terms — was a calculated decision.

“When Paramount brought me in, they asked me to age it up a little bit and intensify it,” notes producer-writer Karey Kirkpatrick (Over the Hedge, Charlotte’s Web), who wrote the final script for Spiderwick after several other writers took cracks at it. “They were realizing that if you put this many CG characters in a movie, it’s going to bring on a certain price tag and you don’t want to limit the casting of your net. The script that was in existence potentially reached too small of a market, so they figured it was OK to make it a bigger adventure and a little more intense.”

Film Notes THE SPIDERWICK CHRONICLES DIRECTED BY: Mark Waters STARRING: Freddie Highmore (Simon/Jared), Sarah Bolger (Mallory), Mary-Louise Parker (Helen), Nick Nolte (Mulgarath), Joan Plowright (Aunt Lucinda), David Strathairn (Arthur Spiderwick) RUNNING TIME: 127 MINUTES TAIWAN RELEASE: TODAY

In other words, not just for little kids.

“It’s not a G-rated movie, it’s a PG-rated movie,” adds another one of the film’s many producers, Mark Canton. “We approached the making of the movie specifically to have some edge and to cross over. We’ve seen the world of Harry Potter get more and more mature — almost R-rated, right?

“But since I think PG is the right rating for us, there’s a responsibility factor, too,” Canton continues. “During the preview process, we had almost no complaint from a parent in terms of the violence or anything else. Somehow, the third act is very gratifying in terms of reconnecting this dysfunctional family.”

Indeed, Spiderwick is as much a story about repairing damaged families as it is about hobgoblins. Angry Jared and introverted Simon move to the weird old family estate with their mother (Mary-Louise Parker) and impatient older sister Mallory (Irish actress Sarah Bolger) because their father has left for another woman. The back story involving turn-of-the-last-century naturalist Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn) and his institutionalized, now elderly daughter Lucinda (Joan Plowright) also involves strained parent-child relations.

“We engineered this thing to be a completely sit-on-the-edge-of-your-seat ride of an entertainment,” the movie’s director, Mark Waters (Mean Girls), acknowledges. “And then you hope, on a secondary level, kids get a sense of the importance of family and how the people who are closest to you are the people that you get angry with but, in the end, must rely on.”

“I brought in this notion that Jared sees the world a certain way and vilifies his mother,” writer Kirkpatrick confirms. “And it’s through the process of seeing the unseen that his eyes open to see what’s going on in his family.”

Thoughtful enough. But how do these new emphases sit with the Spiderwick creators?

“We would be foolish to expect that a series of five books, each with their own plot connected to one overarching plot, would somehow work in a three-act structure that’s 90 minutes long,” admits DiTerlizzi, who began drawing Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You when he was 12. “In fact, I think a direct facsimile of the books would have been kind of boring on screen.”

However, he and co-writer Black, who has a background in teen fiction, were heeded when drafts went too far off the deep end.

And they insisted that the movie stick to certain story fundamentals.

“They’re ordinary kids in extraordinary circumstances,” DiTerlizzi enumerates. “They have no special powers, they don’t live in a land far, far away. And they’re dealing with an unfortunate social reality: that their family is being torn apart through divorce.”

DiTerlizzi has a pretty good grasp on who his books’ core audience is: “It’s usually 9 to about 12. Sometimes we’ll get a 13-year-old in there, but that’s the window.”

A prime moviegoing demographic, but hardly enough to justify a production with many hundreds of complex special-effects shots.

But will the efforts to make Spiderwick appeal to older kids and more adults — a portion of whom would be unlikely to go to a movie full of childish fairies and brownies in any case — alienate wee-er ones and their nightmare-concerned guardians?

“I have a little boy, 4, and a little girl, 8,” says Ellen Goldsmith-Vein, yet another of the film’s producers.

“They’ve both seen the movie, and I think it has the right combination. I don’t know if a lot of people would take a 3- or 4-year-old to a movie like this. But my little boy has been around a lot of fantasy-type stuff and my little girl was watching Lord of the Rings when she was 2, so maybe they’re just used to that type of thing. But a lot of her classmates also have seen the movie and really enjoyed it. There’s enough suspense, but I think they’re also attracted to the family dynamics.”

Author Black recalls her own coming of age with the movie fear factor.

“When I was a kid, I was really scared to see Indiana Jones — you know, the preview with all of the skulls?” she says. “I was 9, 8, something like that. My mom didn’t care; she was, ‘I want to see it, so you’re going.’ And I really loved it. I had to close my eyes during that part, but it pushed the edge of my comfort level. I was scared, but I wasn’t terrified.

“You have to know your kid, obviously, but hopefully Spiderwick could be scary without being terrifying.”

And even if it is too much for some tender sensibilities, watering down a proven tale just doesn’t seem like a very good idea.

“I think we forget the stuff we liked when we were 10 years old,” DiTerlizzi points out. “Grimm’s fairy tales, you know, they’re grim, and you’re reading that to your children at a younger age.

“But let’s not kid ourselves. The video games that they’re playing now, a lot of the other movies that are out there ... . If you really want to feel that lightness, that relief at the end of a story like this, it’s got to get dark before it gets light.

“That’s just basic storytelling.”
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