Main cast: Alexis Bledel (Winifred Foster), William Hurt (Angus Tuck), Sissy Spacek (Mae Tuck), Jonathan Jackson (Jesse Tuck), Scott Bairstow (Miles Tuck), Ben Kingsley (The Man in the Yellow Suit), Amy Irving (Mother Foster), and Victor Garber (Robert Foster)
Director: Jay Russell
I understand that Natalie Babbitt’s book, that this movie is based on, is a popular middle-grade school book in America? Okay, I understand that the movie made the heroine older so that they can do a teen romance thing. Bad move. Although I must say the casting is perfect. Alexis Bledel, the perfect girl-next-door type, bland, sexually ineffective, and not too pretty, plays Winifred the same way she plays Rory in Gilmore Girls: bland and monotonous, only with slower diction. Jonathan Jackson plays Jesse Tuck, looking just like a boyband reject come to life. Between Jesse and Winnie, two seventeen-year old kids whose hormones never seem to have kicked in action at all, their romance is all about running under moonlight and staring deep into each other’s eyes.
Like I said, a perfect romance for the Amish and any ultraconservative crowd. This is the perfect movies for parents to imagine their non-hormonal kids will love to watch. This is the movie that kids will shudder at whenever their parents play this again and again when the kids would rather sneak away to have wild sex and a deep toke afterwards in the backseat of Bad Boy Jesse’s daddy’s car.
Actually, Jesse isn’t 17, he’s 104. But he and his family stop growing old and they cannot die, not after they drank water from a magical spring hundreds of years ago. In early 1900s, our heroine Winnie, rich and privileged, is chaffing at the limitations of her life when she walks in the woods in her estate, encounters Jesse, and then oops, gets kidnapped by Jesse’s brother Miles. She is brought to the Tucks, who then teach her again and again to “do not fear death – but rather the unlived life”.
Lovely flute music bursts forth in the background as our hero Jesse strips to baggy pants and our heroine to her demure undies and he swing her around in the waterfall like a parody of the barroom dance in Titanic. No, there’s no lovemaking in the backseat or Jesse’s hand slapping on the inexplicably foggy car window afterwards. Remember, no sex. This is a Disney movie. For the Amish.
But Winnie’s parents have offered a reward to anyone who can find her. In comes the Man in the Yellow Suit who wants the secret of the springs. He causes a chain of events that culminate in a “You jump, I jump!”-like scenario of thwarted love.
The adults in this movie have nothing to do, while the kids play a wretched job in being as bland as possible. I find it odd though that Winnie will fancy Jesse when we have dark, brooding Miles in the picture. Scott Bairstow plays Miles like a typical growly elder brother, but he’s way yummier than our American Idol reject Jonathan Jackson.
This movie is dull because it takes great pains to be as inoffensive as possible. The result is a movie that is so squeaky and unrealistically clean that it’s as if Disney has deliberately produced a movie specially to placate the crazy family safe watchdog groups out there. This is a kids’ movie alright, because immortality doesn’t seem to have any effect on the Tucks other than Miles. For a 104-year old, Jesse remains a 17-year old teenager at heart, apparently untouched by maturity or loneliness. Pa Tuck offers the usual obligatory advice, but Ma Tuck is embarrassing as the airy-fairy Southern Mommy type. What will immortals do? Learn religion, take up meditation, dress in cool black and lop people’s heads off with swords? In this movie, immortality is like a minor excuse to whine.
Still, I must confess I shed a tear towards the end of the movie.
Anyway, Tuck Everlasting is like a film reel that has been soaked in antiseptic overnight. It’s so nice and proper, it’s actually creepy and unnerving.
