There's no better argument for staying home and reading to your kids
than the charmless new movie adaptation of Stuart Little. Actually,
it's misleading even to call this an adaptation, since it scuttles
everything but a couple of vignettes from the first half of E.B. White's
delightful tale. White's novel concerns the inquisitive mouse Stuart
(voiced on film by Michael J. Fox), the littlest member of the Little
family, and his adventures in a giant-sized world--from yachting on the
boat pond at Central Park to his lovelorn quest for the beautiful bird
Margolo.
The appeal of White's tale isn't limited to its rodent hero: It also
touches on a child's sense of scale, adventure, and wonder regarding the
adult world. (It's also the ultimate little brother's book, pun intended.)
All that has been excised from the script, which reduces Stuart's exploits
to a series of witless computer-generated chases involving a pack of cats.
What makes this even more depressing is the subtextual crap
screenwriters M. Night Shyamalan and Greg Brooker have shoveled in. Would
you believe that the movie parodies interracial-adopting issues? Or that
the Littles' pet Snowbell (voice of Nathan Lane) keeps having his
masculinity questioned? To make matters worse, when the pets "talk," they
look like Conan O'Brien's Bill Clinton cutout with the moving lips.
On one level, it's a shame that a lot of kids will see this coarse,
dull-witted dreck and assume that it represents the work of E.B. White. But
it's even more shameful that adult filmmakers think the only way to capture
a young audience's attention is with toy-commercial selling techniques,
bombastic music, and stale gags about aggression, abduction, and
flatulence. At least director Rob Minkoff didn't get his hands on
Charlotte's Web--he'd have Charlotte the spider chased by farting
pigs with cans of Raid.
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