Written by Vickie
February 04, 2010
No, you’re not seeing things, that really is Wayne Wang’s name listed as the director of this somewhat sweet and sentimental, if scattered, big-screen adaptation of the novel by Kate DeCamillo.
Unfortunately, his efforts, though noble, aren’t entirely successful. The film tells the story of Opal (AnnaSophia Robb), a lonely, tomboyish girl who’s just moved into a trailer park in a new town with her preacher father (Jeff Daniels). Opal asks God to please send her a friend, and what arrives in a moment of Divine intervention + produce aisle mayhem is a scraggly, oafish mutt Opal names after the famous grocery-store chain. Viewers know (partly from intuition, partly from being told) that this dog is going to change the lives of all kinds of folks.
And part of the film’s problem are those very folks. There are SO many of them! This small town is populated with countless quirky but sad residents, from the lonely old woman (Eva Marie Saint) who runs the local library, to the lonely blind woman (Cicely Tyson) who lives in seclusion and the lonely drifter (Dave Matthews…yes, that Dave Matthews) who tends to the pet store with a guitar slung over his shoulder. Everyone, it seems, has a story, and the whole lot of them are struggling with pains from the past. There’s also a subplot about Opal’s mother, who abandoned the family when Opal was three because, you guessed it, she was depressed and lonely. The only person who seems remotely content is Sweetie Pie (Elle Fanning), a five-year-old who eventually reveals she’s lonely because she doesn’t have a dog. (Group hug, anyone?)
All of these tangential storylines are meant to be tied together via the scrappy canine in the film’s title, but there are so many lost souls to keep track of that none really get their due. Each time I started to get interested in a particular character, he or she disappeared for a while and was replaced with a new character with a new heartache to share. I kept waiting for the film’s direction to become clear – where is this story headed? What does it all have to do with the dog? Why do they keep talking about the mother? But, when the “resolution” finally did arrive, it kind of fell flat in a pat, anticlimactic way.
Continuity errors were also abundant, not the least of which are the obvious reshoots interspersed throughout the film, where Robb is clearly outfitted with a really, really bad wig. Who can pay attention to what’s happening in the story when all you can think is, “Good grief! What happened to that child’s hair?!” Cicely Tyson’s “blind” woman also has several moments where she seems to have perfect vision. Her character claims that all she can see are basic shapes, and she struggles to do things like “find” Opal when she’s standing right in front of her in broad daylight. But then, later in the film, she’s happily picking up clothes and cleaning up in a dimly lit living room.
I wasn’t entirely sold on AnnaSophia Robb’s acting, either. I was kind of hoping for the discovery of a new young talent, something along the lines of Kristen Stewart, who played Jodie Foster’s daughter in Panic Room. But not so much. Daniels does what he can with his role, but it’s almost like the filmmakers tried to cram too much into his character without giving any of it a chance to shine through. Tyson, Saint and Matthews are all strong and all have meaty little roles, but none of them really get enough screen time, resulting in caricatures rather than characters. And the dog at the heart of the film is cute enough, but the computer-generated “smiling” is unnecessary.
Because of Winn-Dixie is pretty much guaranteed to entertain the under-10 set, but its neglect of its abundance of riches may frustrate the older members of the audience, for whom a mischievous dog doing mischievous things in the name of community may not be enough.
