Slow but special

A lot has been made about the golden age of television we’re ostensibly living through. Rather less ink and fewer pixels have been spilled in celebration of the bountiful feast of children’s films we’ve enjoyed in recent years. A feast where cheeky Wallace and Gromit; existential WALL-E and Inside Out’s Sadness; chipper choirs of old-school, Disney woodland creatures; and even older, more foreboding sorts of fairy tales all have a place at the table.

The BFG is the last sort, and it offers not so much a story as an atmosphere. The plot—murky and insubstantial as London fog—is draped over bones more bare than those the movie’s villains, a pack of child-eating giants, pick their teeth with. Set against these baddies is runt giant BFG (Mark Rylance, best known for Bridge of Spies and PBS’ Wolf Hall), a sweet, dreamy vegetarian who harvests and bottles dreams.

If you’re not one to enjoy the clammy aura of a perfectly rendered cobbled street at midnight for its own sake, then you may feel that Steven Spielberg’s latest directorial effort moves a bit too sluggishly. This is a movie of subtle, almost tactile pleasures. And most of those come from Rylance as the Big Friendly Giant of the title.

As rendered and made enormous with CGI technology, his melancholic expressions are at once strange and otherworldly, yet still homespun and comforting. He seems both wise and naïve, just as a giant from the wild Giant Country of the far-off North should be. His speech is the real wonder though. As written by E.T.’s late screenwriter, Melissa Mathison, not a syllable or diphthong of Rylance’s garbled, giantish English feels inauthentic or strained. It’s the kind of dialogue that sounds so perfectly fitted to character and context, you almost miss how difficult it must have been to write.

Thankfully we are treated to an awful lot of BFG's delightful talking as he tries to keep his fellow Goliaths from devouring a little orphan girl named Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) he has stolen away to his cave. (This, along with some almost sweetly innocent fart jokes, and a couple of relatable nightmares labeled “I Is Naked at My Wedding” and “I Is Naked at School,” account for the PG rating.)

Spielberg refrains from making the giants too overtly threatening, yet the primal fears of childhood are still there—monsters with names like Bloodbottler and Fleshlumpeater. But so are the deep fears of adulthood that children are likely just beginning to understand.

“What do they whisper?” Sophie asks as she peers at some red, malevolent bad dreams. BFG answers in a whisper himself: “They say, ‘Look what you done. There can be no forgiveness.’”

It’s an ancient lie to chill the heart and bones of "human beans" of all ages.

Spielberg likely knew going in that The BFG wouldn’t be the kind of children’s movie to please masses. Many will find the beginning too slow; many will object to the silly, nonsensical turn of events toward the end. But I am thankful, for those of us who appreciate this kind of very musty, very British brew, that Spielberg has the space to make it.