The Secret Garden: Dreamlike and luminous take on the classic children's tale is a visual feast
By Karen Gordon
Rating: A
As if mid-summer wasn’t beautiful enough, we get the luminous adaptation of the children’s story The Secret Garden, the fourth movie adaptation of the 1911 book by Frances Hodgson Burnett.
The production team has made some changes for this version. They’ve “modernized” it, setting it in 1947, which puts it after the Second World War and the partition of India.
Mary (Dixie Egerickx) takes stock of her new surroundings in The Secret Garden.
The film centers on 10-year-old Mary Lennox (Dixie Egerickx), the child of a wealthy diplomat and his wife, who have raised her in India.
Mary is orphaned and sent to live with her only relative, her uncle Lord Archibald Craven (Colin Firth), who is a stranger to her. He lives in Misselthwaite Manor, a magnificent estate in the Yorkshire moors that has seen better days. The house was used as a hospital for injured soldiers and is in some disrepair. This theme of people and things that are falling apart or abandoned runs through the movie.
The widowed Lord Craven himself seems terribly damaged, a cold, detached recluse. He leaves the care of Mary to his housekeeper Mrs. Medlock (Julie Walters).
Mary is given a room, and told not to explore, but the headstrong girl does indeed wander, marveling at her surroundings and discovering the title garden, bonding with a stray dog and with a robin that seems to urge her on. She also bonds with Dickon (Amir Wilson), who also works at the estate, and who is instinctively connected to the natural world. They happily explore the garden together. The garden, in turn, seems to bloom in reaction to their presence. Vivid dreams and shocking family secrets follow.
In many ways, The Secret Garden is a straight-ahead and archetypical story of a wounded child overcoming hardships to rehabilitate herself and the people around her. But it has its complexities.
The adaptation, by Jack Thorne, keeps some things ambiguous: Is Mary seeing an apparition of her mother, or is she dreaming? Director Marc Munden emphasizes that, by making parts of the movie look and feel like a dream.
The film suggests that the line between magic and reality is fluid; that what haunts us, haunts us, and maybe there are forces that show up to guide us until we can transform those issues or traumas. This is a story about deeper and darker things: childhood grief, adult grief, mystical or supernatural forces, and the healing power of the natural world.
The movie is a visual feast, the overgrown garden, the wallpaper in Mary’s room, the darkness of the house, all are gorgeous.
It all contributes to a sense that Mary - a child who yearns for the love her mother could never give her in life - is being guided to the answers to questions she didn’t know existed for her.
In the real world, we try to shield our children from darker emotions. But, they are at the center of many of the most popular and successful children’s stories and movies. The Harry Potter series, or the Toy Story series, or Inside Out, are tinged with deep sadness and grief. Those emotional wounds, the ones that we can transmute, but not completely heal, are one of the reasons that those movies resonate so powerfully across age groups.
The Secret Garden is definitely aimed at the tweens and teens, but it’s as close to a Pixar movie as you can get in live action. Mary’s sadness plays out as defiant behaviour. But as things change, and the house and garden work their magic, Mary starts to smile. As the movie goes on, Egerickx warms Mary up, and that smile is like sunshine. It’s a beautiful thing.
There’s more going on in this film, of course. Metaphors abound in The Secret Garden if you are so inclined. But the beauty of the story on its surface is enough.
The Secret Garden. Directed by Marc Munden. Starring Dixie Egerickx, Colin Firth and Julie Walters. Available Friday, August 7 on Premium Digital and On Demand.