As a children’s author, Roald Dahl tended toward dark tales. When directing children’s movies, Steven Spielberg tends to sprinkle the stories with sugar. Suffused with sadness and wonder, Dahl’s late novel The BFG is probably his most ideal story for a Spielberg adaptation. The director delivers a kinetic digital-live action spectacle without losing sight of the main characters. “BFG” stands for Big Friendly Giant, but the benign big man who befriends the girl protagonist is an outlier in a world of even larger, hideously gruesome behemoths.
Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) is a willful, smarter-than-her-years inmate of a grim London orphanage. She is plucked from her bed by a giant hand belonging to the titular “BFG” (Mark Rylance) who steals her only because she glimpsed him making his nocturnal rounds stealing dreams for his laboratory, where he mixes ingredients that will produce new dreams. Dashing through the streets, hopscotching across the countryside and leaping cliff to cliff, he brings Sophie to his rustic lair. Despite his rude manners and malapropisms (he’s a “feature of habit”), he has a kind heart. The Big Friendly feels he must keep Sophie prisoner for fear that she might reveal the existence of Giant Country to a hostile human world.
Maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, given the other inhabitants of Giant Country. The Big Friendly is actually the runt of the population, which otherwise consists of a gang of grisly, titanically stupid thugs led by Fleshlumpeater (Jermaine Clement) who can smell human blood just like one of those cannibal giants from the Brothers Grimm. Fleshlumpeater and his mates turn over every stone trying to find Sophie. She is in danger and so is her benefactor.
The resourceful Sophie devises a plan to break Fleshlumpeater’s power by encouraging the Big Friendly to produce a nightmare for the Queen (Penelope Wilton)—not Britain’s exit from the European Union or Scotland’s exit from the United Kingdom, but a bad dream about child-eating behemoths. Will Her Majesty realize that the dream mirrors reality and dispatch the Royal Army to Giant Country?
The BFG preserves some of Dahl’s sharp-stick attitude toward modernity. The Big Friendly probably speaks for the author when he refers to mass media as “the tely-tely bunkum box and radio squeaker.” Exquisitely visualized, and with gossamer images of dreams kept in carefully labeled jars, The BFG is as good as it gets for smart, entertaining children’s fare this summer.
The BFG
Ruby Barnhill
Mark Rylance
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Rated PG
