Film Review: Charlotte’s Web Friday, December 29, 2006 - There were two stories about "pitiful" animals I grew up with, Beautiful Joe and Charlotte's Web. Both animals were unwanted, but saved by a kind human who couldn't stand to see a wasted life. Both of them I read numerous times, and with Charlotte's Web, the E B White classic, it was also released as an animated film in 1973. Released now as a live action film, it was a must-see for me, as I now took my own daughter and her friend to see the type of movie my generation considered a classic.
The girls had read the story and seen the original animated film last year in 4th grade. The only question at this point was, was this adaptation going to do the story justice? Was it going to measure up to their expectations in our hi-tech world, and was it going to measure up to my expectations of the way I fondly remembered this classic? Would it tell the story convincingly, and was the casting suitable?
The two girls enjoyed the movie very much, thinking Templeton the rat (voiced by Steve Buscemi) was cute, especially when he agrees to go to the carnival to enjoy an eating frenzy, and when he tears up at the end when Charlotte the spider (Julia Roberts) meets with her eventual fate. Always having a love affair with words, my favorite part of this story was always the words Templeton and Charlotte would come up with to describe the pig on the web. In fact, I think it was this story that taught me the meaning of the word "salutations" as Charlotte uses it to greet Wilbur (Dominic Scott Kay) for the first time.
I'm becoming quite a fan of Dakota Fanning, who played Fern in the film. Normally, I'm not a huge fan of child actors and actresses. I usually find them very pretentious, whether they're acting or appearing on a talk show. But there's something about her that makes her different, and watching her promoting this film, she was just a cute young 12-year-old that seemed trapped in the body of a 30-year-old. Seeing her in the movie, I was just as impressed. There were none of those cutesy moments designed to make us say, "Awwww." Instead, we were left with the performance of a young woman acting like ... a kid.
There were only two voices I recognized on the animals – one was Julia Roberts and the other was Thomas Haden Church. The Julia Roberts thing was just hard to figure out. Charlotte is very kind and loving, but that spider is creepy looking, and having her voiced by "Pretty Woman" just seemed odd. Church plays one of the crows that sits atop a wire for nearly the entire movie, afraid to swoop down in the cornfields because of the scarecrow. He could read me the phonebook, and still leave me laughing. There's just something about him, dating back to his days on Wings.
The other well-known voices in the film I didn't recognize, but watching the credits at the end, they all make sense. John Cleese as one of the sheep is the obvious choice for the voice. In fact so obvious, he voiced the sheep like a caricature of what John Cleese should sound like. I never would have picked out the rat as being Buscemi, the arachnophobic horse being Robert Redford, nor Oprah Winfrey being one of the geese. The voices were all very appropriate, so it's great casting in that way, but odd that the these high-priced voices are used in a way we don't recognize them easily.
Perhaps the biggest surprise for a celebrity's role in Charlotte's Web belonged to Beau Bridges. Playing the part of a therapist Fern's mother visits over concerns for her daughter, as she spends every waking moment with a baby pig and somehow inspires wonderful things to happen like a spider creating webs with encouraging words, Bridges begs her to see the miracles of life. Perhaps the webbed words are simply just a miracle, and don't require much more thought than that, and perhaps Fern is just living through a childhood phase. I haven't enjoyed him in a role this much since The Other Side of the Mountain.
While there were no momentous changes to this story to update it, it was still enjoyable, just as it always is. For the most part, it stayed true to the story we know as a classic, aside from a few little differences here and there. What sells it is the same thing that sold the book and the original film, the animals and their well-defined characters, with seeing Dakota Fanning and Beau Bridges in enjoyable, true roles as the bonus.
Yuddy Score: Yud
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