- Festivals
Seen in Cannes: The BFG
Roald Dahl stories have inspired groundbreaking films, both live action (Witches, Matilda) and animated (Fantastic Mr. Fox, James and the Giant Peach). His 1982 book BFG (Big Friendly Giant), hitherto made into a play and into an animated film for television, is now recreated for the screen by Steven Spielberg as a mixed digital and live action film which premiered here in Cannes. Spielberg fairly reinvented childhood fantasy on film in the eighties and with BFG he meets another, ehm, giant of the genre. Roald Dahl’s story of a girl’s dream-like encounter and friendship with a gentle giant is told with a child’s eye-view and is both poetic and characteristically empowering – perfect material for the two-time Golden Globe winner and Cecil B. deMille recipient.
When insomniac nine year-old orphan Sophie (Ruby Barnhill) spies a giant delivering children’s dreams to a sleeping London, he kidnaps her and takes her beyond the clouds to Giant Country. A relationship soon develops between the precocious girl and the vocabulary-impaired but kindly creature. Not so much with the nine other, even more massive inhabitants of Giant Country, an uncouth, fearsome, man, and especially child-eating lot who soon think they smell the blood of an Englishman … or girl. As in the book, the adventure eventually moves from the BFG’s wondrous dream-catching workshop to Windsor Palace as the two new friends turn to the Queen to neutralize the unrepentant giants.
BFG is the second recent film this year to seamlessly blend live action and CGI. But whereas in Jungle Book the “mixed media” is used to emulate BFG has the soul of an animated movie in the most classic of traditions. In many ways this is the most Disney-like of Spielberg movies: several sequences of pure cinematic invention elicit the same sense of wonder as Bambi or Snow White relying on visual creation rather than the rapid-fire slapstick and inside jokes that have become staples in a lot of contemporary animation. BFG takes the time to revel in its fable-like world and it pays off. It is a world of enchantment in which Spielberg is fully in his element, working with long-time collaborators, John Williams, (cinematographer) Janusz Kamiński and screenwriter Melissa Mathison (ET The Extraterrestrial, Black Stallion) in her final script (the Golden Globe nominee passed away last year).
Mark Rylance as the friendly giant creates a wonderfully quirky and avuncular character, a kind soul who is profoundly human and humane. Newcomer Ruby Barnhill (11) fairly radiates wonderment and a wisdom beyond her years. All in all the best kind of family film and a perfectly suited one for this festival, always trying to find a medium between auteur cinema and Hollywood movies. Not surprisingly the BFG party on the Carlton Beach was the most massive of the festival yet.