CHARLOTTE'S WEB

Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
Paramount Pictures
Grade: B
Directed by: Gary Winick
Written By: Susannah Grant, Karey Kirkpatrick, from E.B.
White's book
Cast: Julia Roberts, Dakota Fanning, Steve Buscemi, John
Cleese, Oprah Winfrey, Cedric the Entertainer, Kathy Bates
Screened at: NYC, 12/16/06
Opens: December 15, 2006

Gary Winick’s movie, based closely on E.B. White’s classic children’s book, “Charlotte’s Web,” written in 1952, embraces at least two major themes that endear it to children more than to grownups. One is that animals are people too, at least they are to folks who are below the age in which we human beings begin to lose our imaginations. All creatures great and small develop friendships, some even talking to each other, and mirabile dictu, even one of the ugliest, most fearsome-looking insects, the spider, can spin beautiful webs. Can you? Another is that animals of a higher level have intelligence, qualities that we human beings seem incapable of admitting or, more likely unwilling to accommodate, given our taste for spare ribs, burgers, wings, legs and other juices parts of mammal anatomy. What is most surprising is the G rating awarded to the pic by the Motion Picture Academy, given a sad monologue by the title character, a spider literally on her last legs, indicating that we are all part of the cycle of birth and death and must one day cash in our chips. Funerals, then, are not just events that occur for our grandparents.

The chief virtue of Gary Winick’s version, adapted from the book by Susannah Grant and Karey Kirkpatrick, is that it moves beyond Charles A. Nichols and Iwao Takamoto’s animated 1973 movie of the same name with a direct-to-video sequel in 2003. This time, live animals are used: even a crow trainer gains employment among the scores of employees brought together in and around Australia’s Victoria to put together a story whose animal voices include those of Julia Roberts as Charlotte the spider, Steve Buscemi as Templeton the self-centered rat, Oprah Winfrey and Cedric the Entertainer as the two geese, and Robert Redford as the arachnophobic horse. Dakota Fanning (who else?) stars as Fern, determined to save a piglet from the smokehouse, while ten-year-old Dominic Scott Kay serves as the high-pitched voice of the porcine Wilbur. Among the ironies pointed out in the tale are the aggressive crows that seem to come out of a Hitchcock movie would rather starve to death than challenge a stationary scarecrow, a horse trembles on the ground before the might of a spider, saying “don’t hurt me,” and, by implication, a human being might leap onto a chair if confronted by Templeton the rat.

Essentially the story turns on Wilbur’s wish that he live at least long enough to see a snowfall. Having been taken by Fern’s dad, Mr. Arable (Kevin Anderson) , to be immediately axed as the runt of the litter, Wilbur is saved by young Fern, taken with her to school, but soon turned over to be adopted in a neighboring farm by Mr. Zuckerman (Siobhan Fallon Hogan). Wilbur learns from his friends the sheep, the geese, the horse and the cows that the reality of farm life is that he is doomed, but when Charlotte spins webs spelling out such homilies as “some pig” and “radiant,” the community determines that a miracle has taken place. Wilbur is saved.

Seamus McGarvey’s camera takes in a Norman Rockwell scene that could be rural America in the 1950's, an idyllic land in which the only conflict is between human beings and a pig, bringing up memories of Fred M. Wilcox’s 1943 film “Lassie Come Home”–about a poor family’s having to send its beloved dog to another farm. However the wonderful sentiment in that movie is missing here. The dialogue is banal rather than poetic and, what’s more, we wonder why Charlotte should be able to save only a single animal from the ax when, truth to tell, human beings should wise up, stop breeding animals for our food, and close down slaughterhouses throughout the world.

Rated G. 97 minutes 2006 by Harvey Karten
harveycritic@cs.com Member: NY Film Critics Online