British Actress Blog

The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013)

Score: 6/10

Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet

Stars: Helena Bonham Carter, Judy Davis, Callum Keith Rennie, Kyle Catlett.

The Honorable Mention Series:

T.S. Spivet

Helena Carter

Synopsis: A ten-year-old aspiring scientist named T.S. Spivet ( Kyle Catlett ) secretly leaves his family’s ranch in Montana. After his escape from his home, he adventures across the country aboard a freight train to receive an award at the Smithsonian Institute.

Review: A young cowboy from Montana wants to challenge himself by finding the secret to perpetual motion. He creates blue prints for a magnetic wheel and sends it to the Smithsonian Institute who like the invention so much, that they give him an award for his efforts. Of course, little Spivet does not tell the Smithsonian that he is a young 10 year old child for fear of being disqualified from accepting the award.

Dr. Clair

Helena Carter

Helena Bonham Carter does a superb job at faking an American accent, just like in the movie Fight Club (1999). She plays the loving mother named Dr. Clair. Her character is very realistic. She cares about the issues that a lot of women are concerned with in today’s political world. She is not impressed by beauty pageants because they seem to only focus on the ‘looks’ of a woman and does not take into account the other aspects of the person such as intelligence, hard work, and innovation. Her daughter Gracie ( Niamh Wilson ) is the typical and very impressionable teen aged girl falling for every message popular media is feeding her. Helena’s character is concerned with the effect of the commercial world’s ability to tell her daughter how a woman is supposed to dress and act, which is a legitimate concern indeed. Dr. Clair is the embodiment of the intellectual modern woman ( a bit more nerdy though ). Interestingly enough, she is not in the modern world but out in the country in the middle of nowhere.

T.S. Spivet

Kyle Catlett

The film focuses on the concept of adventure and duality. Like the Odyssey By Homer, Odysseus leaves his home at the behest of Agamemnon. In this case T.S. Spevit is on his own Odyssey. The freight train he uses to travel is just like Odysseus’s boat. Ithaca is the Smithsonian Institute and the ‘glory’ or ‘cloes’ in Greek, is the award that T.S. is seeking, as did Odysseus when he blinded the Cyclops. The move is an adventure. Our main protagonist is faced with so many challenges that he must over come in order to complete his goal. Like Odysseus, the young boy must make his way back home after all of the challenges are completed. As for the concept of duality, we see this in the form of the mother and the father. In the film Star Wars Attack of the clones ( 2002 ) Padmé’s world of Naboo is organic for the most part. It is filled with green pastures, representing the aspects of mother nature. While the father stays in the artificial ‘man-made’ areas of the movie, just like the empire from The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the father uses guns throughout the film, whether or not the use of the gun is justified is another issue. The mother is using the what is know in the political world as ’soft power’, she negotiates and talks her way through her problems. When her son T.S. Spevit is suffering from mental anguish, she talks to him and creates the motherly love that helps her son. The father on the other hand uses herd power. He just ignores the fact the his son is dead and pretends that nothing happened rather than getting the family the therapy they need to heal. The syntheses between the two polarities is very similar to the ideas of Star Wars The last Jedi (2017). As Snoke had said ‘Darkness rises and light to meet it‘. As with the real world compromise is the key. Both sides put away many of their differences in order to keep the house hold stable and safe for the next generation, their children. The film has a tragedy involving a child playing with a gun and the very real consequences of such a situation happening. The father buys and allows his 8 - 10 year old sons to play with a loaded weapon as though it were some kind of toy. Seems unreal right? I have personally meet many guys who told me that their father would give them a rifle as a child, give them live ammo, and let them roam into the woods of the American middle states and hunt for their food. I could not believe what they told me. So many grown adult men kill them selves by accident with their guns. Keep in mind these are fully trained professionals such as military personnel and police officers. Look it up on the internet and you will see what I’m saying. Unfortunately children killing themselves by accident is all too real. This situation is not dissimilar from Col. Jack O’Neil’s son ‘Charlie’ killing himself by accident with his father’s loaded service pistol, Stargate (1994) Kurt Russell and James Spader. Its a very Alpha male stereotype that shows men eating meat, being rude to women, and shooting guns in order to show the ‘manliness’ as an Apex predator. Unfortunately these actions from these kind of men revolve around dangerous acts as a sign of strength. White water rafting ending in a rescue situation. Shooting guns ending in an emergency situation because a of a ricochet. Using fireworks and blowing your hand off. Going to a bar, getting in a bar fight, both men spend the night in jail, and waking up to a criminal record in the morning. Trying to climb a freezing mountain and ending up frozen and preserved for future generations to put in a museum. Bungee jumping, the cord snaps, and waking up in a hospital sipping your food out of a straw because your broke almost every bone in your body, going out to walk in the Canadian forest, like some kind of cave person, just so that a bear can chase you because to the bear you are lunch ( in a ‘modern’ world mind you ), all because of this very toxic masculinity environment that says that you cannot talk aboit how you feel, just burry your feelings even though most psychologist will tell you that that kind of action can lead to a major personality disorder.

Children Playing

With Guns

A conquer like Alexander the great can go around killing people in non hostile countries and be praised for breaking up families, sons losing fathers, fathers losing sons, and so fourth. Young men looking up to a ‘hero’ that has caused the deaths and utter destruction of so many people just to prove how ‘great’ he was. Not to say that he does not have many accomplishments, yes does. He defended his home land from invaders but what about the countries that has done nothing to him. The Father of the main protagonist Mr. Spevit is living in a delusion of the cowboy days. He is a Clint Eastwood like character and we all know how he feels about the millennial generation. I’m reminded of the superb film Sicario (2015) with Emily Blunt and Benicio Del Toro. In that film the film makers dealt with a certain dilemma. The main protagonist was a man, not a woman. The idea to change the main character to a woman came from the fact that men think more in the lines of ‘The means justify the ends’. Of course its silly to think all men think one way, but keeping order and maintaining the delicate fabric of society is one of the main objectives of the Alpha types. The same can be said with computer programming, especially artificial intelligence. If we programmers make an AI that thinks too systemically we may get Ultron. Notice that so many AI systems from Amazon to Google use women as their AI voices and action? ‘Empathy’ is the key to not having Terminators walking around wiping us all out. In the film The Day The Earth Stood Still (2008), Keanu Reeves plays an Alien who wants to save the earth, from us humans, yeah, that’s what I’m taking about. In this world you cant be too nice but being too brutal will cause people to hate you and maybe even turn against you, or even rises up in revolt by not balancing the delicate fabric of society. Hopefully we humans can evolve past this silliness. Living in a couture where a father gives his sons a loaded gun to play with, its not surprising that one of them ends up dead. The whole family is suffering from post traumatic stress from something completely preventable. Honestly this part of the film may piss you off like it did me. Some people just shouldn’t be parents.

Happy Family?

Maybe...

The cinematography is perfect. The color, lighting, and set dressing are well done and shows that this is a high quality movie. Nothing beats the beautiful organic backgrounds of this film. This movie is really for kids, but this young boy is taking some very dangerous actions in this film. If a child where to try to replicate the actions of our main protagonist, they would end up dead or way worse. In one scene the boy is called over by a homeless man and stays with him over night. This is not the kind of actions a child should try to replicate at all. One can’t help but feel that this movie is unrealistic at times, but of course, its just a movie. The film its self looks great. there are so many beautifully shot scenes, both indoors and out doors. Inside the Smithsonian Institute award ceremony, the lighting, set dressing, and backgrounds are breath taking. The scenes look perfect. Some of the CGI is a bit silly. At the same time the movie takes a very depressing turn in the third act that makes you wonder how these kids have not been taken away from their parents by the state. Yes the movie seems like a fun adventure, but I wonder if the director and screen writers really understood which direction the film should have gone. The movie is bitter sweet. You can enjoy the film but the issue of children playing with guns and getting themselves killed is not entertainment. I wonder why the film makers took this path when writing this movie. The film is slightly above average, but not a film that I would recommend.

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