The Secret Garden. - movie reviews

National Review, Oct 18, 1993 by John Simon

I fear that the Polish director Agnieszka Holland and the Polish composer Zbigniew Preisner missed the mark with The Secret Garden, and have turned it partly into a sugary Disney concoction, partly into a Wuthering Heights, junior division. I suspect that both tendencies lurk inside Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel, but it was still a mistake for the American producers, having otherwise picked mostly British forces, to put two such melancholy Poles into key slots.

Even the children, who have always proved irresistible in British movies, are a notch or two below the norm. But there is serious overacting from Maggie Smith as the stern housekeeper Mrs. Medlock; she is, in fact, almost as hammy as a robin redbreast (is it always a real bird or, sometimes, a mechanical one?) who steals scenes shamelessly. Most unfortunate is the thoroughly unprepossessing John Lynch as Lord Craven, the lugubrious guardian; about the only good thing I can say for him is that he is not Mandy Patinkin, who played the role in the Broadway musical.

Finally, beloved as it may have been by little Edwardian girls and their Anglo-American female offspring, the novel itself is really not much. The best children's books have been written either by people who had other talents as well (and were, perhaps, a bit crazy), such as Lewis Carroll, or by authors who weren't writing primarily for children (even if they pretended otherwise), such as Mark Twain.