PMany actors say they only want to star in the occasional family film, to make work that their own kids will enjoy. Meanwhile, filmmakers often specialize in the form, becoming the go-to directors and screenwriters to help crack the keys to all-ages entertainment. So why are there so many family-friendly movies that seem made with only the faintest, most tenuous, thinnest understanding of real kids?
This summer, John Krasinski’s heartwarming but silly What If mistakenly assumed that imaginary friends were the preserve of grade-schoolers, not toddlers. Now comes Harold and the Purple Crayon, an adaptation of Crockett Johnson’s classic children’s book. In it, the protagonist, Melvin (Benjamin Bottani), is on the verge of middle school, yet speaks earnestly about an imaginary dog that follows him everywhere. It’s supposed to be Mel’s reaction to the death of his father, but, as with What If, it’s actually a red flag that the writers have a simple, quietly warped and misleading idea of how kids deal with grief.
Mel’s mother, Teri (Zooey Deschanel), gently encourages him to make real friends, but Harold (Zachary Levi), a kid who has escaped a world of 2-D cartoons based on illustrations in books, takes the exact opposite tactic, happily accepting that Mel believes in nonexistent pets when he first meets the family. We’re supposed to think that he’s playfully engaging with kids in a way that other adults don’t, but Levi plays Harold with an aggressive, surly quality that never lets us dismiss the possibility that he’s just a dangerous guy eager to share the delusion at hand.
Those familiar with the original (and its sequels) may be asking themselves: Isn’t Harold a baby? The answer is basically yes. As depicted in the book, Harold is an adorable, fuzzy preschool kid with a magical purple crayon that can bring anything he draws to life. In the film, Harold has grown into a cartoonish adult man, so to speak, frolicking with his self-made animal sidekicks, Moose (Lil Rel Howery) and Porcupine (Tania Reynolds), and comforted by the presence of an unseen narrator. When the narrator’s voice disappears, Harold, Moose, and Porcupine decide to track him down in the real world. Though the live-action adaptation turns the animals into humans, the magic crayon can still create anything the artist can think of, turning Mel and Teri’s lives upside down in the process. (The Porcupine also separates from the group, but mainly because there’s something the filmmakers could occasionally cut off.) The movie knows there must be a moral in this, so it settles rather arbitrarily somewhere between “Be yourself” and “Imagination is a good thing.” Indeed. For a grieving, friendless kid, being yourself is just that.
Almost nothing goes right in Harold and the Purple Crayon. The characters don’t even understand the logic of dreams. Reynolds, who gives the only good performance in the film, retains his porcupine-like mannerisms in human form. Meanwhile, Howley, while looking and acting mostly like a human, talks endlessly about being a moose, except for one scene where he briefly transforms into a CGI moose for added noise. The story is premised on the characters annoying a group of service workers, and is driven in part by a crassly opportunistic brand partnership. Most of the film is set in the American discount chain Ollie’s, where Teri works, and while she doesn’t like her job, other characters repeatedly enthuse, “We have everything here!” The monotonous-looking visual effects set pieces mostly consist of characters riding various vehicles made of crayons and exclaiming how awesome or scary they are. In a moving reversal of the profession that has perpetuated Crockett’s work for so many years, the villain is an egotistical, smug librarian (Jemaine Clement, again reviving his now-well-worn pompous author trope).
Director Carlos Saldaña comes from animation, having worked for years on the popular Ice Age films for the now-defunct studio Blue Sky, but the strange fluidity he brought to those mundane projects disappears here in a purple haze. The haziest is Levi, who makes the occasional incongruity of his performance in the Shazam films (playing a moody teenager in an adult’s body, but also behaving like a glib teenager at times) the driving force here. Levi winces in fits of joy, changes his level of sophistication as Harold from scene to scene, passive-aggressively berating Terry for bringing messy real-world concerns into his single-parent household. This may be the most exhausting lead performance of the year.
Overall, Levi makes the perfect counterargument to Harold growing into a childlike adult in the first place. What purpose does it serve other than to rehash a gag that the filmmakers must have realized, long overdue, wasn’t popular? The pairing of a childlike boy with Deschanel is supposed to evoke the timeless magic of Will Ferrell’s holiday comedy Elf, with the crucial difference that Ferrell is funny. Harold the Purple Crayon is not funny, it has no insight into kids, and it costs far more time and money to watch than it does to read the book it’s trying to be metatextual. It seems like a gaudy endurance test of the imagination.
