Cinema Short Takes: Madeline

Give us the '40s Margaret O'Brien. Now there was a child actress who knew that childhood could be an orphanage, an abode of isolation, misery and misunderstanding. When Miss Margaret's lower lip got to quivering in Meet Me in St. Louis, why, it took a Judy Garland ballad to dredge the poor kid out of depressive hysterics.

Such geysers of emotion are out of fashion; today's movie children are action figures. Yes, girls too. Madeline (Hatty Jones), the heroine of Ludwig Bemelmans' children's books, is an orphan, but she spends little time pondering her fate. Instead, she does what contemporary movie kids have to do: get into cute trouble. She incites insurrection at the boarding-school dinner table, pontificates on a bridge railing and falls into the Seine, plots to set off firecrackers under the feet of innocent visitors--it is all meant to be super delicious fun.

Isn't, though. Director Daisy von Scherler Mayer and the screenwriters treat the original tale like a bottle of Perrier left too long uncapped; the effervescence evaporates. Fine actors (Frances McDormand, Nigel Hawthorne) get swallowed whole, and the child stars are, shall we say, not swathed in charm. Madeline does finally face up to her orphanhood (a touching little scene), but by then the film is a lost cause, and Bemelmans' Madeline a lost soul.

--R.C.