The last time Jean-Pierre Jeunet made 'an American movie' he killed a sci-fi franchise with the admittedly pretty but dramatically vacant Alien Resurrection. The Young And Prodigious T.S. Spivet is also on shaky ground - the Amelie director takes the vibe of those children's adventure movies of the 70s, ones that pop up on daytime TV starring Jodie Foster, and turns it into a kid's movie for adults about grief. A tough sell that.
The eponymous T.S. Spivet (Catlett) is a ten-year-old genius living on a Montana ranch with his stern cowboy dad (Rennie) and scientist mum (Bonham Carter), both emotionally distant since T.S.'s twin brother Layton (Jakob Davies) accidently shot himself with his rifle the previous year. Ignored by his grieving parents and thinking that he wouldn't be missed, T.S. jumps on a train and embarks on a journey to Washington DC when Smithsonian curator (Davis), unaware he’s just a child, awards T.S.'s the prestigious Baird Prize for his perpetual motion machine...
Although he's always made interesting films (Alien Resurrection aside), Jeunet has a penchant for including the background material writers use to get to know a character but never include in the movie. Whether it’s Amelie's tendency to stick her hand into grains of sand or T.S.'s father's fondness to lift his whisky glass at a forty-five degree angle and drink every forty-five seconds, Jeunet obviously reckons these things are cute and quirky and add depth but what they really do is clutter his movies and halt proceedings from getting underway. There's a lot of this messing about early on in …Spivet, delaying the action and making the audience itchy as to where this is actually going. Catlett's mumbled narration doesn't help.
But once the second act is up and running and T.S. is on the train that the film emerges from its stupor. From there the peerless Judy Davis takes hold of everything and wrenches the movie into life. Still underpowered and way too uneventful for a road movie involving a young boy, Jeunet at least begins to scratch at the surface of T.S.'s sunny demeanour and finds a frightened boy, feeling guilty over his twin's death, who knows for a fact that his father preferred his brother. Weighty stuff oddly dealt with a lightness of touch.
Although occasionally touching and funny, and Jeunet fans will bask in the pretty pictures, The Young And Prodigious T.S. Spivet, unsure of whom it's for, is neither here nor there.