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Tuck Everlasting
(Reviewed August 28, 2002)
-
Okay, I realize that an "F" grade for this one might seem a tad harsh. After all, the radiantly wide-eyed Alexis Bledel (from TV's "Gilmore Girls") is sweetly appealing, the nature settings are lush-'n'-lovely, and the plot on first glance appears to be one of those perfectly respectable Disney workhorses about an overprotected child learning-'n'-growing after being exposed to unusual characters.
What ruins the movie is that its basic underlying theme is flagrantly, insultingly, even cruelly idiotic.
Bledel plays a WWI-era teenage girl who meets a reclusive family that has discovered the fountain (or a spring, in this case) of eternal youth. The Tucks keep to themselves in the woods because People Just Don't Understand folks who never age, never get sick and never can be wounded or killed. Meanwhile, a mysterious Man in a Yellow Suit (Ben Kingsley) is searching for the Tucks so he can drink from their secret spring and sell sips from it to well-paying customers.
Okay, so far, so good. The problem arises when Tuck patriarch William Hurt earnestly explains to Bledel that immortality ain't all its cracked up to be. He points out that it is unnatural to break the "cycle of life" by not dying, and laments the fact that his family members' lives just go on and on without ending, as if that's a bad thing.
What a load of utterly unmitigated horseshit. If given the choice, would anyone besides the most psychotically deluded religious fanatic hesitate for a split nanosecond before deciding to live forever in perfect health? Put it this way: Somebody gives you the choice between continuing to wake up every day as a perfect physical specimen, or gradually wasting away and DYING. Kind of a no-brainer, don'tcha think?
With that underlying premise, "Tuck Everlasting" becomes rather a sick little treatise on how wonderful it is to wither away into blind, deaf, addlebrained incontinence; or how virtuous it is to be killed in a car wreck; or how aesthetically pleasing it is to contract cancer. Maybe Disney can set up a special Tuck Everlasting Suicide Island at its theme parks, where impressionable youth who buy into the movie's despicable philosophy can complete the wonderful cycle of life while wearing a pair of goddamned Mickey Mouse ears.
Also: In the original novel, Bledel's character is only 10 years old. she has been aged into her mid-teens for this movie, so that her infatuation with teenage Jesse Tuck can flower into a tender, young romance. Unfortunately, their first kiss is preceded by a forest campfire scene in which Bledel does a sensuous harem dance so wildly inappropriate and completely out of place that it should delight pedophiles everywhere.
Back Row Grade: F
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