And it is, first and foremost, a visual delight, a Victorian picture book come to life, from its brief prologue in India through its darkly enchanted recreation of Misselthwaite Manor on the Yorkshire moors. Kate Maberly, a solemn child with wide cheeks and huge, pensive brown eyes, plays 10-year-old Mary Lennox, orphaned when her parents die in an earthquake in India. A spoiled and angry child who has never learned to cry, she’s shipped off to the care of her English uncle, Lord Craven (John Lynch), a recluse in the 10th year of mourning for his late wife, the twin sister of Mary’s dead mother. The first, Gothic half of “The Secret Garden” is suffused with death and with wintry, desolate imagery. Completely neglected by her uncle, Mary is entrusted to the stern care of the awful Mrs. Medlock (Maggie Smith), just the sort of sourpuss Mary could turn out to be if she didn’t also meet the radiantly sweet servant girl Martha (Laura Crossley) and her brother Dickon (Andrew Knott), the first two people to draw Mary back to life. And then, of course, she meets a 10-year-old even more spoiled and death–obsessed than she–Lord Craven’s invalid son, Colin (Heydon Prowse), a bedridden little aristocrat who has never been outdoors for fear of the “spores” that might terminate his fragile grip on life. He’s the old Mary’s mirror image, her soulmate, and when she takes it upon herself to save him–to introduce him to the magic she has discovered in her secret garden–we know that she has saved herself.
“The Secret Garden” is a fable about nature and renewal, about a winter child who finally discovers spring inside, and director Holland has an instinctive feel for its gravely magical tone. Her images have a mysterious simplicity: they’re as recognizable as archetypes should be while evoking the wonder of something you’ve never seen before. The Polish-born director of “Olivier Olivier” and the World War II dramas “Europa, Europea” and “Angry Harvest,” powerful movies best known in art-house circles, Holland may seem like a strange choice for a children’s film, but there has always been a heightened, fairy-tale undercurrent in her movies, even when they’re set against the Holocaust. Because she’s so attuned to the dark side of Burnett’s tale, the sweetness that blossoms in the second half has surprising emotional weight: the movie’s bliss, and tears, are earned.
She also has a dream team. Stuart Craig’s production design is as good as it gets: his exquisitely dank Misselthwaite Manor is both nightmarish and ravishing, and cinematographer Roger Deakins drapes it in inky blacks and sharp shafts of milky English sunlight. Every object in this moviefrom an antique jigsaw puzzle to a dustcovered miniature chest to the beautiful tapestries that hang in Mary’s bedroom–seems perfectly chosen, a feast for the eyes. And Zbigniew Preisner’s lovely score, ominous and lyric, is seamlessly linked to Holland’s images.
The spell this movie casts could easily have been broken by the slightest miscasting. But the child actors at the heart of this tale–the grave, soulful Maherly, pug-faced and throaty-voiced Knott, and Prowse, with his hilarious neurasthenic hauteur–are uncanny. They seem to have stepped out of another century. Crossley, the older girl, is a vibrantly endearing Martha; and it is no surprise that Maggie Smith makes Medlock a riveting authoritarian bully. “The Secret Garden” has the feel of a classic, and one can only hope that it can find its way up against noisier, flashier, more heavily promoted fare like “Dennis the Menace” and “Free Willy” (almost all the other children’s movies are focused on boys). But it would be an equal shame if adults felt they needed a child in tow to see this movie. They’d be missing out on one of the richest cinematic treats of the summer.
