INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (21 page)

J
ean-Pierre Jeunet’s
THE YOUNG AND PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET
delights in contriving impossible solutions to the manifold bookishnesses of Reif Larson’s wilfully unfilmable novel about a boy prodigy with a genius for maps and diagrams, who runs away from home in Montana to ride the transcontinental rails and collect a prize from the Smithsonian, taking with him the unhallowed ghost of a family tragedy and the stolen secrets of his family’s past. In the book version, Spivet’s precocious infographics unfold his story out of the text and into the margins, while the stolen manuscript of a tantalisingly incomplete and unreliable family history stands as an enigmatic book-within-the-book which T.S. reads and tries to make sense of as he rides. Jeunet pulls out a formidable arsenal of cinematic dazzlements to translate all this, with mechanical models, animations, popups, cutaways, and characteristically gorgeous set dressing and stunning faux-Americana location work, while still cleaving closely to Larson’s text.

Jeunet’s one previous foray into American film with
Alien Resurrection
was a never-again experience for most involved, which is something of a challenge for a film that sets out to celebrate the American landscape and the scientific imagination it nursed. Like his ingenious young hero, he’s addressed the challenge by a combination of brilliance and barefaced deception: writing the script in French and getting it translated back by minions, and faking the locations by shooting his ostentatious parade of faux Americana in Alberta with a French-Canadian crew. Jeunet’s old lucky charm Dominique Pinon plays a kind of Seasick Steve figure with what must kindly be viewed as a Franco-American accent; and the sf element has been moved around, cutting the journey through a railroad wormhole in the midwest, but rather jarringly introducing a perpetual-motion machine as the fruit of T.S.’s research, with scaled-up implications that unfortunately have no place in the story. The novel’s messy climax, with its shaggy-dog narrative of secret scientific societies and tunnels in the wainscoting of America, has been recomposed to bring Helena Bonham Carter (as our hero’s fiercely sane entomologist mom) back into the action, while ditching the revelation of her pivotal role in the Smithsonian plot. The stolen journal is now an illustrated family album rather than a suspect biography of an ancestor, and the final payoff is simplified down to it sentimental basics. It’s not a film with an obvious audience, nor one with much interest in playing by others’ rules; but at least he’s had the courtesy to read the book and reboot it in ways that respect its essential virtues. It won’t be enough to save it, but it takes you somewhere never visited before or since. There was once a time when that was what films thought we wanted.