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How entertaining? ★★★★☆
Thought provoking? ★★☆☆☆ 10 June 2014
This article is a review of THE YOUNG AND PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET.
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“Beware of mediocrity, it is the fungus of the mind,” Dr Clair (Helena Bonham Carter)
After the emotionally inert MICMACS, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has attempted to recapture his AMÉLIE quiver. While not fashioning a world as hermetically joyful as his arguably most celebrated work, the inventive filmmaker has created a luxuriously detailed 3D portrait, which uses the technology to jaw-dropping effect. Every year, it seems, we are gifted a technical marvel shaking up the third dimension that too often feels redundant (see previously GRAVITY, LIFE OF PI, HUGO, AVATAR).
After the emotionally inert MICMACS, director Jean-Pierre Jeunet has attempted to recapture his AMÉLIE quiver. While not fashioning a world as hermetically joyful as his arguably most celebrated work, the inventive filmmaker has created a luxuriously detailed 3D portrait, which uses the technology to jaw-dropping effect. Every year, it seems, we are gifted a technical marvel shaking up the third dimension that too often feels redundant (see previously GRAVITY, LIFE OF PI, HUGO, AVATAR).
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Coppertop Ranch, Montana, a voice-over from the titular T.S. (Kyle Catlett), a ten-year old scientist boy wonder, who introduces us to a world so colourful yet soaked in absent outwardly articulated melancholy, “My father loves Layton more than anything.” Taciturn cowboy-from-another-era, his father (Callum Keith Rennie) has an unassailable bond with T.S.’s non-identical twin. A household as kooky as you’d expect from the mind of Jeunet: Mother botanist (Carter), fame-obsessed older sister Gracie (Niamh Wilson), metal-eating dog Tapioca, and gun-toting Layton (Jakob Davies); except Layton no longer seems to be present. Utilising a diced time frame, the story unfurls by drip-feeding us what happened, while simultaneously hurtling along in the shoes of the young protagonist.
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Like father like son, like mother like son, the Spivet home has divided smoothly in terms of traits (bar rebellious black sheep Gracie). T.S. is a Mozart of inventions, having discovered the holy grail of science: The perpetual motion machine – a hypnotically steam punk apparatus. Submitting it the Smithsonian, he is unexpectedly awarded the Baird prize. Unknown to the Washington institution is his wunderkind age. A ranch of heartache forces T.S. to run away and make the grand cross-country trip alone to collect his award. Crazy strangers met along the way might have been unwatchably sinister in the hands of say Ken Loach, is instead an alternate reality of the quirkily encouraging. An odyssey of beautiful imagery assuages the bijou narrative.
Expert heartstring pulling is almost consummately pulled off, if it wasn’t for the botched climax involving a talk show confession-confrontation. An attention-seeking modern age movie symptom - the need for an audience to validate an intimate outpouring – as if there are no extraneous witnesses, did it really happen? A shame, as THE YOUNG AND PRODIGIOUS T.S. SPIVET might have been a picturesque tearjerker.
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