An effulgent love letter to ’80s kid cinema laced with a distinctly quirky, Kiwi dryness, Ant Timpson’s heartwarming Bookworm reunites star Elijah Wood both with his Come to Daddy director and New Zealand (this time sans hobbit feet). It also gives pre-teen star Nell Fisher a breakout leading role as the precious kid to end all precocious kids.
Wood turns the quirks of his starry-eyed but hilariously inept dad into comic gold as the man does what he can to endear himself to his kid, with lots of funny business involving card decks, false thumbs, and chains of scarves. And Fisher makes an absolute meal of dialogue that would be challenging for any actor, let alone one so relatively young and untested.
When her mother is left in a coma after a tragic toaster explosion, Mildred (Fisher) is forced to reconcile with her long-absent father, Strawn Wise (Wood). A deadbeat, moderately impressive illusionist (“Magician sounds cheap,” he repeatedly stresses), Mildred is initially reticent to welcome the man back into her life. That is, until she realizes that Strawn may be a useful companion in her search for the legendary Canterbury Panther—or, as she terms it, New Zealand’s version of Bigfoot. Bickering but forced to work together, the duo set off on an adventure beset with danger and setbacks that will test their father-daughter bond.
Bookworm winningly channels the spirits of pre-millennial family cinema that didn’t pander to kids and featured big emotional stakes and sequences of mortal danger. Balancing cheekiness with gooey poignancy, Timpson and Toby Harvard’s screenplay mines humor from the unexpected and absurd, including Arnold and Angelina (played by Michael Smiley and Vanessa Stacey, and named after Schwarzenegger and Jolie, because why not?), two kidnappers who are so low-key and polite that their targets don’t even realize they’ve been nabbed. We also get extended references to a certain successful Las Vegas magician and prominent member of Hollywood’s infamous Pussy Posse who supposedly stole Strawn’s act.
Any annoyance to be felt from Mildred’s incorrigible precocity is cut by the sharpness of Fisher’s timing and how likable a presence she is. She and Wood keep things lively even when the film feels like it, much like our main characters, is going in circles. Strawn and Mildred’s search for the fabled panther is ultimately less dramatic and filled with derring-do than Bookworm’s logline and poster art promises, but hanging out with such agreeably goofy characters and taking in the mountains of New Zealand is nothing short of a pleasure.
Notably, Bookworm provides Wood with his first role as a father, soon after becoming one himself. This is a story that’s aimed, liked the best family films, not just at kids, but also parents who may find themselves failing to live up to their own expectations. Countless kids’ movies are about holding onto a belief in magic, and Bookworm may be not be terribly different in that regard, but it sees something uniquely special in the bonds between parents and children. It shows that the real magic of parenthood is found not in becoming the person you thought you should be, but embracing the adult that your child needs you to be.
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