Emma Thompson in Editing – The Hollywood Reporter

Like The Wizard of Oz or Peter Panthe story of Mathilde has held up in many different forms with adaptations and adaptations – first as a very English book for young people, then as an Americanized film, then a stage musical that is now a film adaptation of that stage musical – precisely because it’s so damn weird.

The chatty narration of Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel constantly dives in idiosyncratic directions, regularly makes snarky asides and, like so much of Dahl’s work, is often laughably funny as it tells the story of the super-smart girl of the same name who challenges her petit-bourgeois parents to become a reader. and take on the bullying headmistress Miss Trunchbull. But it’s also full of horrors and casual atrocities inflicted on children by adults, like throwing children around by their hair and locking them up in iron-virgin punishment boxes. Mind you, the heroine sometimes falls back on adults too – for example, by gluing a hat to her negligent father’s head and using telekinetic powers that, while not up to the horror level of careerare still scary enough to terrify adult high school principals.

If it weren’t for it all set in a world full of whimsy, chocolate cake, and magical kids who can read William Faulkner and Jane Austen’s novels before starting kindergarten, the story would end with social workers and child abuse allegations. abuse. To put it more succinctly, it’s not that we as a society have become less tolerant of child abuse than people were a generation ago. But we do it with a lot more police scrutiny, and that makes the joke of Mathilde a bit – as they say these days – problematic.

All that puts the team behind this film version of the latest musical, a crew led by director Matthew Warchus (Pride), who also directed the stage show, originally for the Royal Shakespeare Company, which premiered in 2010. and inspired casting, the team manages to hit most of the right notes with this perky, idiosyncratic adaptation. Or maybe the film has just enough bright shiny objects and tightly synchronized dance-child chorus lines to keep anyone from worrying about all those problematic things. At least it works for the most part.

Those familiar with the intellectual property at hand will know that the theatrical adaptation by Warchus and Co. slightly deviated from Dahl’s source. It omitted characters like Matilda’s brother and the school’s deputy principal, adding in the bit where Matilda tells her librarian, Mrs. Phelps, the story of an acrobat and an escapologist, which later proves to be crucial. So if the show was a little different from the book, the show’s movie is hardly any different, except some of the songs have been cut and it’s compressed into a manageable, short attention-span-friendly 117 minutes.

Meanwhile, trading theater spaces for real-life locations like the huge stately Bramshill House to fill in for Matilda’s school Crunchem Hall inevitably skews the film towards a more naturalistic feel. Ditto the use of visual effects instead of the old-fashioned wire and light tricks the show used so effectively.

All that doesn’t make the end product worse or better, but it does make it different, and Warchus has been smart about who plays who and how wide he lets the cast get with the intrinsically over-the-top material. Irish moppet Alisha Weir, who was still a tween when this was filmed, anchors the image with her unstoppable energy in the central role, projecting a justified outrage at the injustice around her that is explainable, but still vulnerable.

The ‘big’ stars in the cast aren’t such big household names as to overshadow Weir, and the performances strike a delicate balance between comedic broadness and cinematic subtlety. In this regard, Emma Thompson offers a masterclass in threading the needle while still under a ton of ugly latex (bringing happy memories of her Nanny McPhee franchise). A great year with this and her turn in Good luck to you Leo Grande, Thompson even manages to inject a little bit of humanity into the film’s main villain, Miss Trunchball, especially with her soft rendition of “Hammer,” in which Trunchball brags about her sporting triumph in hammering and ability to strictly to the rules of the sports. (“And if you want to make the team / you don’t need luck or self-esteem,” she quivers.)

As Matilda’s vulgar TV-watching and ballroom-dancing parents, Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough fit right in with Thompson’s approach to caricature, with Riseborough in particularly mature comedic form in the opening scene, refusing to admit she’s pregnant even as the contractions go on. to start. Rob Howell’s gloriously ostentatious costumes and Sharon Martin’s hair and makeup help, in harmony with the production design’s palette of warm, sunny pastels.

Perhaps the most surprising performance is that of Lashana Lynch as kind teacher Miss Honey, almost the only adult (aside from Ms. Phelps of Sindhu Vee) to show any kindness towards Matilda. Though millions saw Lynch in the last Bond movie No time to die, her performance was almost completely overshadowed by the hoo-haw about her, a black woman, playing the latest cop to be given the 007 designation. This should also be a good year for her, given her achievements in The woman king and, for a hot second earlier in 2022, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness. Here she can show off a much softer side as the kind of friendly schoolteacher every lonely, intelligent kid loved in grade school, plus she’s got a strong set of lungs, which she showed off well in her big solo for “My House.” .

Where the inelegant but undoubtedly very specifically titled Matilda the musical by Roald Dahl really comes into its own is in the big show-stopping tracks like “School Song” and “Revolting Children,” where the ensemble of tightly rehearsed tykes show off their stuff. Usually looking and singing straight into the camera, who seems to recoil from their attack, they are the naughtiest company of schoolchildren to come along since Malcolm McDowell set fire to the academy in If…. (1968). They are not problematic; they are problem solvers.