Entries in the Category "ellen raskin"
Movie Review: The Westing Game
A made-for-TV movie based on one of the best children’s books ever written. I saw it playing on Showtime and decided to watch. A mistake, always. Very few movies retain the charm of the books on which they are based—and even fewer manage this feat when they are packaged to be ultra-palatable for even the dumbest of children. Just look at the DVD cover art for this movie.
I know, yuck.
The book, in comparison, does not pull its punches; I read it for the first time in the third grade, and damn if I understood what had happened when it was finished. I had to read it another time or two to grasp how the mystery came together, but eventually I did, admiring its cleverness along with its indelible characters, its funny non sequiturs and its strange, disaffected tone.
I probably would not have watched this if I had seen that DVD cover art first (and known what kind of movie this was going to be), but I did, so, with all apologies for bashing something too pathetic to defend itself, here are my complaints.
The trimming of the potential heirs down to ten (or was it twelve?) from sixteen was probably done for character economy. However, it laid waste to the thematic tie-in to chess, and the way Sam Westing plays the characters as pawns against each other. Presumably Flora Baumbach, Theo Theodorakis, and Mrs. Hoo were considered too boring to be included. The actor who played high school track star Doug Hoo had the worst running form I have ever seen (all plodding and floppy) and I’m convinced it was because he was disappointed that Doug was written out of the inheritance plot and thus served little to no purpose in the movie at all.
The one character I wish had been excised was our fair protagonist, Tabitha Ruth “Turtle” Wexler. The character is a preteen oddball with a prickly temper, a curious nature and a gift for playing the stock market. The girl in the movie was a full-fledged movie moppet, all perky enunciations and side ponytail. When she got emotional her voice quavered unconvincingly. The actress grew up to be a scenester who gets made fun of regularly on Go Fug Yourself, which seems about right.
Turtle’s sister Angela occupied a strange position in the movie, too. There is a bunch of invented BS about the girls’ father having lost their house to gambling debts and needing to regain his position in the finance world (in the book he’s a podiatrist). This is all meant to explain why her fiance from the book was relegated to a tertiary character and a tertiary character from the book was promoted to fiance status. This actress was not terrible, incidentally, but the character was pitched so bitterly she was unrecognizable from the Angela of the book, who is described as being too timid to have ever learned how to drive.
How about Chris Theodorakis? Well, besides handling the struggle of being a combination of himself and his brother Theo from the book, the character dealt with a completely nonsensical medical condition. The character in the book has an unnamed illness which was probably supposed to be cerebral palsy. The actor in the movie was in a wheelchair and spoke haltingly. When asked about his condition, he replied that he “thinks fast but speaks slow,” and that was that. For some reason, the character to whom he gave this response did not say, “…and the wheelchair is for what?”
They kept the chess game that Chris Theodorakis (actually Theo) plays with a mystery opponent, but wedged it uncomfortably into the 90s by making it an Internet chess game (like octogenarian Westing would hop onto Pogo to play a game—whatever). Turtle and Chris also figured out the key to the clues by plugging them all into a search engine and seeing what came up. WEAK! But I guess in ’97 the Internet was still exotic.
Ray Walston plays Sam Westing as well as his various alter egos in bad wigs. Diane Ladd, too good for this movie, plays Mrs. Crow. The settings and locations were actually the only thing I really liked about it; the city as well as the apartment building where the majority of the action takes place seemed old, musty, bleached-out and run-down, which is the perfect atmosphere for the story. I wish as much thought as went into picking those locations had been expended adapting the script. And that the little girl who played Turtle had been unceremoniously fired.
The movie predates the Harry Potter movies and all of the Pixar films except for the first Toy Story, a time when standards for kids' movies were a little lower. Even keeping that in mind, this was still a weak effort.