**½/****
starring Elijah Wood, Michael Smiley, Nell Fisher
screenplay by Toby Harvard
directed by Ant Timpson
by Walter Chaw Kiwi jack-of-all-trades Ant Timpson’s sophomore feature after his strong hyphenate debut Come to Daddy reunites him with that film’s star, Elijah Wood. Bookworm, a quiet, charming echo of Hunt for the Wilderpeople, tells a familiar tale of wayward fathers and precocious daughters in a light, warm-hearted way. The girl is 11-year-old Mildred (Nell Fisher), and her dad is failed illusionist Strawn (Wood). When Mildred’s mother, Zo (Morgana O’Reilly), suffers a terrible accident, landing her in a coma, Strawn materializes out of the past to reunite with the child he sired but abandoned to pursue his dreams of becoming the next David Copperfield. Meanwhile, Mildred is convinced that if she can find proof of the Canterbury Panther, a legendary cryptid that allegedly lives in the New Zealand wilderness, she’ll be able to bring her mother back from the brink. Of course, the $50,000 prize money wouldn’t hurt, either. The problem is that Strawn is fairly useless as a father and even more so as an outdoorsman, but working in their favour is Mildred’s confidence and Strawn’s desire to finally do the right thing here in Mildred and Zo’s moment of crisis. Hilarity ensues.
Closer to the point, family-friendly shenanigans ensue as Mildred repeatedly humiliates her ridiculous father and Strawn accepts his plight with a rueful, exhausted patience. He summons a bit of fire when he recalls how David Blaine betrayed their friendship and stole his shtick but is otherwise sad-eyed and resigned to be the butt of the joke. Wood is uniquely good at finding depth in quiet characters. His eyes are enormous and expressive, and his Strawn is obviously wounded without anything like self- deception or pity. The walk between enjoying his being pissed on by a sharp-fanged little girl and hoping she’ll give him a break eventually is a delicate line. When the tide turns, as you expect it must, the timing is good, though I confess I hoped the film would take a lot darker turn than it ever does–and sooner. Ultimately, Bookworm is the kind of movie that makes a joke about being absolutely certain there’s not going to be a rainstorm and then we cut to our heroes hiding out from a rainstorm. It’s the kind of movie that rips off the best sequence from Pixar’s otherwise moribund The Good Dinosaur but doesn’t take it quite as far.
I’m not sure why the film is called Bookworm. Timpson has said that’s the original title of David Mamet’s script for The Edge, the movie about two men trying to outsmart a bear, but rather than attempt to untangle the relationship between the two films, I choose to think of “bookworm” as having something to do with how Mildred is bookish. Some tension arises early on when she believes that she and Strawn have found common ground with their admiration for David Copperfield, only to…well, you get it, dad humour is still humour, I suppose. Bookworm does what it sets out to do; it’s shot cleanly, written modestly, and well-performed. Little Fisher, recently seen in Evil Dead Rise, knows what she’s saying and has stardom ahead of her if she wants it. I’m not sure who the picture is for, exactly, but I accept that it’s not for me. I did think a time or two of that line of Jack Black’s in High Fidelity where he makes fun of a customer looking for Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You” as a present and then, in mock horror, apologizes in case the recipient of said gift is in a coma. But that’s uncharitable: a film in which a panther tries to cut the rope of a suspension bridge in its greatest moment of tension is probably meant for the very young to enjoy with their parents, and why not? I think both Timpson and Wood have a lot more in them, though, and for as inoffensive as this one is, I’m glad they got the perfunctory “quaint Kiwi comedy of manners” out of their system.
