I tend to put a lot of movies on different Watchlists, but I often don’t get to them until they are about to leave. Sometimes that means a lot of movies to cover in a month’s time. I think my HBO Max watchlist has a good nine or so movies leaving by the end of the month. Will I get to them all? Probably not, but I will try. But what to start with? Well, why not the Danny DeVito-directed Matilda? That came out when I was a little too old in my own estimation to see something like that, but DeVito is a fairly underrated actor and director in many ways, and former child star Mara Wilson seems to have found new life as a cool adult who can offer insight and humor on her own past.
Besides, it’s based on a Roald Dahl book, and that guy’s work always has the most interesting take on kid-friendly stories, to put it mildly.
As explained by the narrator (DeVito), dishonest used car salesman Harry Wormwood (also DeVito) and his wife Zinnia (Rhea Perlman) find themselves with a baby girl, eventually named Matilda. While their son Michael (Brian Levinson) is very much the TV-watching idiot his parents are, young Matilda was taking care of herself since she was two years old and is absolutely brilliant, a girl who would rather read books than anything else and can do advanced multiplication in her head. She’d like to go to school, but her father needs her at home to sign for packages in part of his shifty used car business. Sure, Matilda is the only one who’s figured out the FBI is staked out across the street, but she may sadly be used to her family ignoring her. But a stray comment by her father about punishing people when they are bad gets to Matilda in interesting ways.
That will come in handy when Harry finally sends his daughter to school. Crunchem Hall Elementary School sounds like a dream come true until she gets there and meets the principal Miss Trunchbull (Pam Ferris), a child-hating woman who likes to literally throw children around as punishments. The only saving grace in Matilda’s life is her teacher Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz), a woman who actually encourages Matilda and her other charges to learn more things even in the midst of the miserable place that is Crunchem Hall. Will Matilda find happiness?
Now, I liked this movie, but I gotta say, this is a very odd movie. Why is DeVito both the sweet narrator and the nasty Harry Wormwood? They aren’t the same person. Meanwhile, DeVito the director favors these weird close-ups and odd angles throughout the movie. Even as Matilda finds ways to teach the awful adults in her world some much-deserved lessons, this is a movie with a very unique POV. Maybe that’s a hallmark of DeVito’s directorial style since I can’t say I am all that familiar with his other work, but it sure gave the movie a very different look.
And oddly enough, maybe because I didn’t grow up with Matilda, there is a part of me that wonders if this works better as a movie for adults than it does as a movie for children. There’s nothing here that couldn’t work for kids, but at the same time, I think it will work better for older viewers. The odd angles and the like just struck me that way. This really is just a weird movie, but it’s a good kind of weird.
Grade: B-
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