August 2, 1996

Roald Dahl was my favorite author when I was a little kid, but I didn’t know his book Matilda because it didn’t come out until ’88. Watching the movie version again the story seems kinda sweet and wholesome by his standards, even though it envisions the world as a place full of cruel, crude idiots. Its warmth lies in its heroine, a smart girl who finds an angelically supportive teacher to help her through her difficulties. Similar idea, but a little more pure than a poor boy winning a chocolate factory. (I wasn’t that surprised when I read that an editor had to talk Dahl out of his initial version where Matilda uses her psychokinetic powers to torment innocent parents and help her teacher gamble.)

Director Danny DeVito (THROW MOMMA FROM THE TRAIN) must’ve still been concerned about MATILDA (adapted by Nicholas Kazan [MOBSTERS, DREAM LOVER] and Robin Swicord [SHAG]) being a little mean, because he cast himself as the kind-sounding narrator to balance out playing the asshole dad, Harry Wormwood. Harry and his wife Zinnia (Rhea Perlman, CLASS ACT) somehow raised their daughter Matilda (the precocious Mara Wilson, MRS. DOUBTFIRE) to the age of six without noticing – or at least not approving of – her brilliance. She loves to read, but has to sneak out to go to the library. Harry, an unethical used car salesman, forces her to watch TV junk and refuses to let her go to school, because “Who would sign for the packages?”

She’s delighted when he finally enrolls her at Crunchem Hall Elementary, but unfortunately it was just to help sell a car to principal Agatha Trunchbull (Pam Ferris, MEANTIME), an abusive monster who has a dartboard with pictures of students in her office and frequently locks kids in an iron maiden closet she calls “the Chokey.” A former shot putter, hammer and javelin thrower who competed in the 1972 Summer Olympics, she uses those skills to throw children long distances. Somebody should do something about this, but nobody’s up to it.

Strangely this has parts that remind me of another favorite author of my youth, Stephen King. There’s the STAND-BY-ME-esque scene where Trunchbull forces Bruce Bogtrotter (Jimmy Karz, later in THE WEDDING SINGER) to eat an entire cake in front of the assembly. Instead of puking he gets his victory by succeeding at eating the cake after Matilda starts a chant supporting him. Then he proudly licks the plate. Of course there’s some CARRIE in Matilda’s discovery that she can move objects with her mind, and that she can use that against those who mistreat her. (In this case that’s Trunchbull and her parents – all the kids are nice to each other.)

Like Carrie, Matilda also finds one strong advocate at school, her teacher Miss Honey (Embeth Davidtz, ARMY OF DARKNESS, SCHINDLER’S LIST). Noticing Matilda’s high level math skills, she talks to Trunchbull and then the Wormwoods about advancing her to a higher grade, but none of them give a shit.

I completely forgot about this part, but Miss Honey turns out to have been raised by Trunchbull, who may or may not have murdered her father and made it look like a suicide to inherit his house. Matilda ends up sneaking around in the house to find evidence, and there’s a well done scene where Trunchbull senses an intruder and stomps around the house using her shot put as a destructive weapon.

There’s a funny running joke about how FBI agents Paul Reubens (BATMAN RETURNS) and Tracey Walter (BATMAN) are always surveilling Harry, trying to bust him over stolen car parts. Matilda repeatedly warns that they’re cops, but her parents believe their cover story that they’re speedboat salesmen.

Either because it’s 2026, or because I’m old, Miss Honey being so close to a student and having her over at her house and stuff seems to cross a line. I kept thinking of how Julia Garner’s character in WEAPONS got in trouble for giving a student a ride home. The ending where (spoiler) Matilda abruptly convinces her parents to sign adoption papers and Miss Honey agrees to become her mom at the drop of a hat feels especially weird. But obviously this is a fantasy world.

I remember being a little bothered at the time that a Roald Dahl adaptation wouldn’t try to be out of time in the way WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY or JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH were. In particular, I was annoyed by a box of Cheerios being prominently used in her telekinesis. Of course, 1996 is now the old days, so ‘90s things combined with the old timey school and the Wormwoods’ fashion does play as a mix of time periods. There’s also a charm to how unconvincing some of the visual effects are, like whenever Trunchbull throws a child.

I think reading Dahl was pretty formative for my sense of humor, so I still dig his mischievous meanness, but watching this now I’m a little uncomfortable with some of the undercurrents. The portrayal of the Wormwoods still amuses me, and I certainly recognize some of their qualities from real people, but I also sense a bit of classist snobbery, including in the admittedly witty opening narration: “Everyone is born, but not everyone is born the same. Some will grow to be butchers or bakers or candlestick makers. Some will only be really good at making Jell-O salad.”

Similarly, I still think Trunchbull is a really funny, over-the-top villain, and also I can’t help but think there is lesbian coding in the jokes about her butchness and the implications of possible predatory behavior toward “fresh meat” Matilda. In fact, we could compare her to the warden Mom Smackley in SWITCHBLADE SISTERS. I know grown-up Wilson identifies as bisexual and is smart and outspoken, so I wondered if she’d ever commented on this. I couldn’t find anything like that, but I did find an interview with her on a podcast by The Advocate where she notes how often LGBT people tell her they identify with MATILDA because “It was about feeling different but finding your own place and finding your own family.” Which is obviously the much larger message most of us are going to take from it, whatever reason we had for feeling different. (Hopefully including being a hulking butch lady.)

CHAIN REACTION was released on the same day as MATILDA, and here are the reasons you would think it could be great: directed by Andrew Davis (CODE OF SILENCE, ABOVE THE LAW, UNDER SIEGE, THE FUGITIVE), starring Keanu Reeves (LITTLE BUDDHA), Rachel Weisz (DEATH MACHINE) and Morgan Freeman (UNFORGIVEN), written by J.F. Lawton (UNDER SIEGE, THE HUNTED). Being a Davis movie it takes place (partly) in Chicago and has a packed supporting cast: Fred Ward (THUNDERHEART), Brian Cox (BRAVEHEART), Joanna Cassidy (VAMPIRE IN BROOKLYN), Chelcie Ross (THE LAST BOYSCOUT), Tzi Ma (RAPID FIRE).

In the summer of ’94, SPEED proved that POINT BREAK hadn’t been a fluke, Reeves was serious about being an action star. In ’95 the somewhat actiony JOHNNY MNEMONIC was, at worst, an admirable failure showing that he had taste for interesting material. So doing a big summer movie with Andrew Davis seemed like a great time to kick his action career into high gear. But that would have to wait a couple years. Oh well.

Not that it’s terrible, it’s just pretty bland. Reeves plays Eddie Kasalivich, a student machinist working on a University of Chicago project to convert hydrogen into clean energy. After a successful test and a party to celebrate, Eddie escorts drunk physicist Lily Sinclair (Weisz) home on the bus. When he returns to the lab to retrieve his motorcycle he finds his idealistic mentor Alistair (Nicholas Rudall, THE BABE) murdered, and then the whole building blows up. We know it’s some kind of conspiracy to stop them from sharing the information for free on the internet. Eddie and Lily quickly notice they’re being framed as the culprits, so they go on the run.

Being an Andrew Davis film it’s very technically well put together, with plenty of production value. Big, complex scenes with FBI professionals conducting their search, discussing the clues in different offices, looking at different screens, arriving at locations with the language of cinema telling us how important it all is. Ward is a welcome presence as an FBI agent. But you can’t help but compare it to THE FUGITIVE, and nobody’s gonna think it’s as good. I have to wonder if Davis was only being offered rehashes and was only half-hearted about this. One issue is that there’s not a strong antagonist like the Tommy Lee Jones character. Theoretically Freeman could fill that role, as the project head who helps the FBI, urges Eddie to turn himself in, and turns out to have mysterious connections to intelligence agencies. But he’s pretending to be a friend the whole time, even if we suspect otherwise.

Reeves and Weisz provide what they can with their usual charisma, and I think both are fine in it, but neither given especially strong characters to work with. The best and most memorable scene would have to be when Eddie is almost caught on a bridge that opens before he can cross it. He climbs up while the cop behind him slides down like that dude in TITANIC.

Then he maneuvers himself to the underside and manages to crawl under a truck and hide long enough to get away. When he just barely makes the train where Lilly has been waiting for him he says “The bridge was up.” The line made me laugh and gets funnier when I consider that as far as we see he never tells her that whole thing happened.

A stand out part only in retrospect is a brief bit where agents stop the guy delivering flowers containing a coded message. At the time it was nothing, but now…

…we can see that “D.C. Flower Delivery Man” is played by twenty-something Michael Shannon in his second ever movie (after GROUNDHOG DAY).

The goofiest thing about the movie is that there’s a post-credits tag where a huge area is destroyed by an explosion and then we hear Keanu say, “Whoah.” I took this as a joke proving Davis doesn’t take this too serious, but maybe I wasn’t paying close enough attention to understand it. Wikipedia says, “the C-systems facility is seen imploding in the landscape,” and even though I watched it last night I admit I don’t remember what that means.

Overall the tone is fairly dour, as appropriate for a movie about the true observation that nefarious forces stand in the way of the changes we need to save our world from environmental catastrophe. Unfortunately much truer today.

Along with the aforementioned J.F. Lawton, the screenplay is credited to Michael Bortman, story by Arne Schmidt (producer of ROBOCOP) & Rick Seaman (stunts in OUT FOR JUSTICE) and Josh Friedman (first credit for the guy who later wrote WAR OF THE WORLDS and KINGDOM OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and created Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and did a good enough job that James Cameron hired him to work on the AVATAR sequels). Reeves has said that he signed on to an entirely different script and went along with Davis’ changes but regrets it.

MATILDA opened in third place at the box office, CHAIN REACTION in fourth. Both made more than their budget in theaters, but probly not enough to be profitable. MATILDA definitely did well on video and is remembered fondly by many of the young people who saw it. Reeves was nominated for the Razzie for Worst Actor, rock solid proof that at the time he was considered dumb and bad, an easy punchline for the earth’s hackiest taste-lackers. Today, all of the 1996 Razzie voters are dead or irrelevant, while Keanu is a beloved icon of American cinema. He won the long game, even if CHAIN REACTION didn’t help.

P.S. I also started to watch PHAT BEACH, hoping I could analyze its treatment of a fat character in comparison to THE NUTTY PROFESSOR. But it started out so crappy and not in an interesting way that I had to abandon it and move on with my life. It seems like a very sub-standard attempt to follow in FRIDAY’s footsteps as a ’90s comedy for Black youth, but it’s written and directed by the white guy who later created Entourage.