Movie: The Secret Garden (Agnieszka Holland, 1993)
The garden is real, the disease imaginary! So many similar stories take the opposite approach presenting a vulnerable/sick/empoverished kid and transporting them into a fantasy world, where they find an often temporary way out of their miserable existence in reality. Despite their best efforts, I've never found these stories particularly uplifting and got a kick out of The Secret Garden's insistence that Colin Craven can only find a better life once he embraces the reality that he is not ill and starts engaging with the beauty of the world around him. I have never read the Frances Hodgson Burnett book, but understand that this adaptation is fateful to its conception of the garden as an actually existing place. Too many films forget that this is different from it being a realistic place. The Secret Garden does not. One of the film's strengths is that its garden is fantastically beautiful and vast.
Agnieszka Holland films the garden in a way that you never get a true sense of its geography and its size. There seems to be no limit to the scope of the garden, or to the colors, plants, flowers and animals Colin, Mary and Dickon will find in it. This is contrasted with Misselthwaite Manor. The countryhouse to which the garden belongs looks majestic on the outside, but its interiors are grey, creaky and filthy. It's filled with artworks and prestigious objects taken from Britain's colonies that were once obviously valuable but are now hanging on for dear life; you can almost smell the dust coming through the screen. The lord of the manor is the despairing Archibald Craven, who since his wife's death keeps his son Colin bedridden, instilling in him a belief that he is sick and will die if exposed to sunlight. A whole cohort of housekeepers is employed to take care of the 'ill' Colin, living in fear of death until his cousin Mary comes to live at Misselthwaite Manor when her ruling class parents die in an earthquake in India.
Mary too is not a happy kid. She has been spoiled her entire life by Indian servants and doesn't know how to clothe herself or to interact with people. She is an entitled brat and the film doesn't sugarcoat her outbursts. Those first scenes are a deeply unpleasant and unflinching look at a miserable arrogant kid that has no clue of a life outside her deeply protected wealthy bubble. That starts to change when she finds three friends in young housekeeper Martha, stable boy Dickon and gardener Will. I really liked that none of these people change in anyway their behavior to accomodate Mary. They force her simply by being themselves to adapt to them and to discover what it means to be a kid, and to interact with the living world around you. It can't be lost on anyone watching this film that the positive transformation for both Mary and Colin only starts when they abandon their aristocratic, colonialist, confines and form bonds with the common people and nature.
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