Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden has been adapted to film numerous times since its collection into novel form in 1911. There was a silent version in 1919, a 1949 adaption that pulled the same trick as The Wizard of Oz a decade earlier by switching from black-and-white to Technicolor at a pivotal moment and countless TV adaptations. However, perhaps most familiar to modern audiences is the 1993 version, a film both equal parts gothic and idyllic that was unavoidable for any girl growing up in the ’90s. Now, comes director Marc Munden’s take.
Though Jack Thorne’s script varies from previous versions in some of the details, the basic plot is the same. After 10-year-old Mary Lennox’s (Dixie Egerickx) parents die of cholera, she is sent from India to England to live with her uncle Lord Archibald Craven (Colin Firth) in his decaying estate, Misselthwaite Manor. Bratty and bored, Mary is left to wander the grounds alone and finds a locked garden that her uncle closed after Mary’s aunt (who was the twin sister of her own mother) died a decade earlier. With the help of Dickon (Amir Wilson), the younger brother of one of the maids, and her sickly and equally bratty cousin Colin (Edan Hayhurst), the children revive not only the garden, but the family itself.
As with other adaptations, our entry point into this world and its narrative is Mary, who we meet alone and chillingly unfazed by how deserted her Indian home is after her parents’ deaths, making up stories to amuse herself as if nothing is wrong. In that scene and throughout, the film and Egerickx’s performance establish that brattiness isn’t Mary’s defining trait as it is in most adaptations. Rather, it’s her precocious sense of play, her boldness to keep being herself in the face of adversity even. That shift in emphasis applies to the whole film as well and Munden’s The Secret Garden isn’t so much about profound rebirth as it is about the power of imagination.
In the filmmaking, that’s largely expressed though wholly original moments of magical realism. For instance, when Mary is sitting in her drab yet intricately decorated bedroom in the manor, thanks to the magic of CGI, the birds printed on the wallpaper begin to move as she imagines that they’re real. It’s a choice that hearkens back to the wonder of the ’49 version, in which the sudden reveal of the revitalized Technicolor garden becomes a powerful expression of how much the children and Misselthwaite itself have healed, but the more it’s used here, the less impressive it become. So, by the time the ghosts of the twin sisters are roaming through Misselthwaite’s halls the CGI magic doesn’t so much spark wonder as highlight how artificial the film feels.
Perhaps the most striking example comes when Mary and Dickon help the stray dog that first led her to the garden after it accidentally gets caught in a bear trap. Dickon cleans and bandages the animal’s wound, but it’s still unable to walk once he’s done. There’s a tragic beauty to the wide shot of the worried children with the dog laying between them in the sunny, verdant garden the powerlessness these child feel—that is, until the CGI grass starts to sway in some magic healing ritual and the whole scene suddenly feels corny. Over and over, rather than let its characters and the children supposedly watching it confront uncomfortable truths about life or difficult emotions, The Secret Garden repeatedly softens their impact, focusing on wonder rather than the difficulties of life that make wonder so important.
While it’s understandable if difficult to defend that the film doesn’t want to upset its young audience, that lack of daring unfortunately applies to the characters and narrative as well. Some of the unique parts of Thorne’s script have enormous potential to add new textures to the well-known story, but they mostly go nowhere. Making Misselthwaite a hospital in World War II is a smart way to make the estate seem even more haunted and cursed than it already feels when Mary first arrives, but that’s as far as it goes. The trauma of that experience doesn’t tie into Grace’s death or how Craven has treated his son or even really the state of the house. The only concrete effect it has are the empty shells left sitting in piles on the ground. The same goes for the choice to cast the maid Martha (Isis Davis) and Dickon with black actors. There’s are moments when race and class are glancingly addressed–the most compelling being Martha’s stunned and clearly insulted reaction when Mary calls Martha her servant–but the film does nothing with those tantalizing issues, quickly moving on to more precocious playing.
Perhaps the most frustrating examples, though, are the ways the film balks at critiquing the parental figures’ behavior. First, there’s the suggestion that part of why Mary had to develop such a vivid imagination was that her mother’s depression left Mary not only to amuse herself, but to believe that she wasn’t loved. Second, is the suggestion and fairly obvious truth that there’s some degree of Munchausen syndrome and self-loathing fueling Craven’s treatment of Colin. However, Thorne’s script essentially lets these characters off the hook for their varying degrees of parental abuse, by emphasizing not the lasting effects on the children, but the parent’s own emotional turmoil. And while that choice may encourage a young audience to see their parents as complex and flawed, the film does so at the expense of teaching children about coping with profound sadness or loneliness. Instead, the children are so busy being precocious and resilient that erasing that complexity leaves them feeling emotionally empty and the young cast’s show and eager performances feel like bad child actor clichés.
Though The Secret Garden is filled with literal magic, it lacks the figurative magic needed to make it great. By adding in strains of magical realism and focusing more on the children’s joy than the sadness that binds them together, Munden’s film feels as if it doesn’t dig past its characters’ surfaces and worse, leaves new ground unexplored. It’s a beautiful looking film with occasional moments of wonder, but like a dead tree left standing after the innards have rotted away, The Secret Garden is ultimately hollow.
