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The popular children's books by Mary Norton have been filmed before, but never with as much imagination and ingenuity as you'll find on display in this delightful fantasy film released to critical praise in 1998. The "Borrowers" of the title are a family of tiny people who live in the walls and under the floorboards in the homes of "normal-sized" humans; they earn their by "borrowing" the household items (string, food crumbs, buttons, etc.) needed to furnish their tiny hiding places and provide their meals. The little Clock family lives happily undisturbed in the home of an aged aunt, but when the aunt dies and her will is stolen by an unscrupulous lawyer (John Goodman), the Clocks face eviction and the frightening hazards of the outside world. Under the ingenious direction of Peter Hewitt, this simple, straightforward movie mixes comedy, adventure, and suspense with some of the cleverest special effects you've ever seen, taking full advantage of effects technologies to immerse you in the world of the tiny people. A climactic chase scene in a milk-bottling plant is a visual tour de force, and the movie's smart and dazzling enough to entertain parents and children alike. After its modest success in theaters,
The Borrowers stands a good chance of becoming a home-video favorite.
--Jeff Shannon
It's surprising that filmmakers have only recently latched onto Mary Norton's endearing tales of the Borrowers-miniature humans, six inches high, who live under floorboards and behind wainscots of English houses. On the other hand, it takes the latest technology to do them justice: witness the scene, early in Peter Hewitt's movie, when Pod (Jim Broadbent), the gallant head of a Borrower family, springs around a full-sized kitchen and lands in the ice dispenser. Hewitt wraps the family in a slice of overheated hokum, involving a ravenous villain (John Goodman) and a pest exterminator, but violent slapstick and low scatological gags seem way out of place here; the Borrowers are most entertaining, and most true to themselves, when they are simply hanging out, dining off a single pea or hiding among the toy soldiers in a child's bedroom. They move from a dusky English cottage to a neat suburban street, but behind them looms a surreal cityscape that suggests an H. G. Wells fantasy of the future. Small world, huh? -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
