Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp stars in a gorgeous-looking but unemotional adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s novel
There is something melodramatic and soapy about this glossy adaptation of Michael Morpurgo’s second world war novel for children, the story of a French boy who helps to save Jewish children by smuggling them over the mountains into Spain. The problem, I think, comes from a fear of upsetting its target audience of older kids (the film has a 12A rating). So the tough bits are fuzzily done – at arm’s length and hurried over – making for an oddly flat unemotional watch. The accents don’t help: the actors all speaking English dialogue with ’Allo-’Allo accents (with Jean Reno thrown in for a bit of Gallic authenticity).
The setting is occupied France. In the Pyrenees, teenager Jo (Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp) discovers that mean old lady Widow Horcada (Anjelica Huston) is in fact heroically hiding Jewish children on her pig farm. Huston does her best with a thin character, but even she struggles with the starchy dialogue: “Some people collect coins or stamps. We collect enemies of the Reich.” Widow Horcada is also harbouring a Jewish man, Benjamin (Frederick Schmidt), who has become separated from his young daughter, Anya. Reno plays Jo’s grandfather, a salty first world war veteran who marches around the village wearing his army medals in proud defiance of the occupying force.