Bridge to Terabithia

I went and saw this movie on the recommendation of my mom and little brothers. Andrew, my oldest younger brother, told me I ought to bring a tissue with me. I did not heed his warning, though if I had it wouldn't have helped much; what I should have brought was a whole box of tissues, or better yet a towel. Not since E.T. has a movie been this innocent and uncomplicated before all of the sudden breaking into a level of profundity that (seemingly effortlessly) reduces you to the sort of tears you cried as a little child. Crying in movies is nothing to be ashamed of, if they're honest tears, and when a movie moves me to tears I count it first and foremost as a credit to the filmmaker's skill. The story here is, as I alluded to before, very simple. There's a new girl in a small rural town who befriends a farmer boy with four sisters, a financially haunted set of parents, and a boatload of personal insecurities. They create a place in the woods where they can go to escape from the harsh things they experience while growing up. Jess, the boy, wants his father to be proud of him, and he wants to be the fastest runner at school. He wants his little sister to adore him without pestering him out of his mind, and he wants his older sisters to just let him be. he loves to draw and fills papers and notebooks with the wanderings of his imagination. He wants the attention of his music teacher for whom he harbors a secret crush. Most of all he just wants life to make sense, to be filled with wonder and joy when all he can see is the mundane and depressing setting of a home and school painted in many shades of gray. Leslie, the girl, becomes friends with Jess and begins to show him that he can find that wonder and joy in the world, or rather, in their secret magical world of Terabithia which must be entered by way of an old rope swing over a forest gully. They have their adventures, both in the real world and in Terabithia. In the real world they use their cunning and wit to knock the school bully (a girl who forces other kids to pay for bathroom use) down a few pegs, and then help he back up when she finds herself on the receiving end of schoolyard mockery. In their imaginary they fight giants and strange birds and beasts of all kinds, though the movie is surprisingly lenient with the amount of Terabithia we the viewers are allowed to see. I remember at one point in the movie I was thinking to myself that these kids, for all their different trials, didn't really have it all that bad. I mean what kinds of things do kids worry about? They don't have to pay taxes or balance the books, they haven't got all the worries of adult hood that they will someday carry. The thing is that by the end of the movie, we are taken through a number of things young children deal with, things like loss, guilt, grief, and so forth, and we are reminded that these things are just as real, perhaps even more so, for children. But it is not the kind of movie that leaves us stranded in despair, for we also see how children understand and experience grace, forgiveness, love, and the really extraordinary power of friendship. In jest I often refer to movies as a "powerful experience" it's no jest this time, this movie has a powerful message told in a very understated and innocent way so that it pierces straight to our hearts before pretty much mangling them and then delicately assuring us that there is magic in the world that can mend the broken pieces once more.

B+