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‘Matilda’, made in 1996, stars Mara Wilson in the title role. She was nine at the time, and clearly already an accomplished and confident actor. I knew the outline of the story, which I read more than once when my sons were small, but I hadn’t remembered the details. And the film, inevitably, has a more visual approach than the book. It’s also set in the United States rather than the UK, with American accents rather than British ones. But although that disturbed me slightly at first, I quickly got used to it.
So it starts with Matilda’s dreadful parents, Mr and Mrs Wormwood. They are brilliantly played by Danny DeVito and Rhea Pearlman (who was his wife in reality as well as in this film). They are caricatured slobs, in the best Roald Dahl style. Mr Wormwood is a used car salesman who buys stolen car parts and cheats his customers. Mrs Wormwood uses a lot of makeup and dyes her hair, and spends her afternoons playing bingo.
Matilda has an older brother, Michael, who is likely to follow in his father’s footsteps. But her parents have no interest in her. And the film shows this: Mr Wormwood wonders if he can send her back after she’s born, and basically ignores her. She’s left home alone from a very young age, and quickly becomes self-sufficient. We see a younger Matilda dressing herself at age two, teaching herself to read all the family’s magazines at age three, and then daring to ask her father for a book to read when she is four.
When this is refused, the action moves to the library, and eventually she starts school. She has a lovely class teacher, Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz). But the school headmistress is the dreadful villain Miss Trunchbull (Pam Ferris), who terrorises the children, and makes examples of any who dare to stray outside her strict rules. She’s a former athlete who thinks nothing of throwing a child around by their hair and out of the window…
If it were taken seriously this would be a terrible catalogue of abuse. But the action is so exaggerated, Miss Trunchbull so horrendously caricatured, that it feels like fantasy rather than reality. and Pam Ferris plays the part to perfection (or whatever is the unpleasant equivalent). As one of the children comments, they can’t complain because their parents would not believe that a school head could be so appalling.
Matilda is highly intelligent, already reading Charles Dickens and other classics, and doing complex arithmetic in her head. And she also realises that when anyone gets angry with her, she has strange magical powers that can move objects. At first this happens a bit randomly but she manages to train it.
The acting from the villains is all overdone, but then that’s the way Dahl’s books work. Danny DeVito is the director as well as playing Mr Wormwood, and he sticks pretty closely to the story. I read the book this morning to see just how close it was. There are a few changes made, which probably work better from the point of visual continuity. There are some extra scenes in the film, too, such as a delightful sequence where Matilda dances in her living room as she moves blinds, pictures and other objects without touching them.
There’s also a lengthy sequence when Matilda and Miss Honey venture inside Miss Trunchbull’s house. It’s entirely in Roald Dahl’s style and fits well with the overall story, adding some action and tension, and also some humour. And there are scenes in Mr Turnbull’s garage, whereas the book just describes him talking to his son about what he does. I thought it a very good balance of following the book closely and adding in new scenes that demonstrate people’s characters or behaviours in ways that wouldn’t work in a book.
We were engrossed in the story right from the start, and even though I knew it would end satisfactorily, there are some quite stressful moments. The images of Miss Trunchbull glaring at children, her face distorted close to the camera, demonstrate brilliantly how the children might have seen her.
The rating for this film is PG, which makes sense. Most children would probably find it funny, with Miss Trunchbull taking the place of a vicious dragon or other monster of fantasy stories. But some might find her disturbing, particularly her worst punishment - the ‘chokey’ - and others might be upset at the way Matilda’s parents are so neglectful. So parental guidance is recommended; ideally a parent should watch this with a sensitive or young child seeing it for the first time.
But with that proviso, I would definitely recommend it. Particularly for children who have enjoyed the book.
Our DVD came with a few ‘extras’, which surprised us. One required re-watching the film to be able to see how the 'magic' scenes were made, and we did see a few of those, which were quite interesting, but we didn't want to see it all again. One 'extra' was an ironic and mildly amusing list of etiquette rules, illustrated (or not!) by snippets from the film.
Another of the extras was about libraries, perhaps for children who weren't familiar with them. Oddly, the librarian was portrayed as rather a scary-looking woman with bright red lips and a face that came too close to the camera, almost like Miss Trunchbull, though clearly the librarian was a likeable person. And the final extra that we watched was a rather wobbly video made by Mara Wilson herself.
