A Fable: Bridge to Terabithia

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This one turned up unexpectedly in our mailbox; I had put in the Netflix queue long ago, and it had crawled its way to the top, despite furious rearrangements of the list.  (Since I got married last Summer, a lot of cinematic evangelism has taken place!)

It took me a while to get onto the wavelength of Terabithia.  Since all the science fiction and fantasy has been blazing across the screen: Avatar, Tangled, Brave, Transformers, John Carter, and Pirates of the Caribbean, oh my, not to mention the Lion, the Witch, the Wardrobe, and Ted and Alice, it took me a minute or two to get the lie of the land.  In this story, the pretense is truly pretense, and imagination becomes very real, but is recognized to be mostly imagination.

The story is as follows: Jesse (7th grade) is fourth in a family with four sisters.  As the story opens, we find out that his working-class family is undergoing financial hardship.  He loves to draw, and is a great runner, and his greatest fan is his kid sister, May Belle.

New neighbors move in next door, including a girl his own age called Leslie.  Leslie makes friends with Jesse (though we're told later that Leslie has trouble making friends).  At school, and on the school bus, the big bully is an eighth grader called Janice, who makes the kids pay admission to use the bathrooms.  Both Jesse and Leslie are frustrated by Janice's shenanigans, but neither of them has the guts to confront Janice, or even the boy bullies in Jesse's class, who pick on them every chance they get.

After school, though, Jesse and Leslie retreat into a woods adjacent to their two houses by means of a rope swing.  They call the woods Terabithia, and the rope swing is the Bridge to Terabithia.  In Terabithia, every tree and bush becomes either a magical hero or a villain; for instance a tree becomes a huge troll, and dragonflies become their own soldiers.  Jesse picks up a little dog, who becomes a prince and a fighter on their side, and a troll hunter.

Jesse never allows May Belle to play Terabithia with him and Leslie, though she never gives up asking to come along.  Leslie is kind to the kid, and gives her the Barbies she no longer plays with, but leaves Jesse to handle his sister.  Clearly Jesse has trouble with his jealousy, as well as cowardice.  In Terabithia, the two teenagers fight their imaginary foes, and build up courage to face their school bullies, and earn some minor victories.  They play a mean trick on bully Janice.  But Leslie hears Janice crying alone in the girls bathroom, and Jesse insists that she go in and talk to the crying girl.  Leslie returns to report that she helped Janice deal with a problem, and seems pleased with herself for having done so.   (This is the only instance we see of Leslie growing, in the movie; the rest of it's mostly about how Leslie helps Jesse to overcome his cowardice.)

There are two teachers we see: the hard as nails English teacher, and the warm, guitar-playing music teacher, with whom Jesse is sort of in love.  We're left to discover this without too much help, but Jesse's admiration of the music teacher is a jealous one, and he resents Leslie participating in it.

Jesse is invited on a weekend by the music teacher, Miss Edmunds, to visit the museum in a neighboring town.  When he returns, he finds that Leslie has died, hitting her head while crossing the creek to Terabithia.  Jesse is devastated.

Somehow, Janice, the former bully, and little May Belle, and Leslie's heartbroken parents, Jesse's father, and, unexpectedly, the English teacher, between them, are able to make Jesse come to terms with Leslie's death.  His last achievement is, significantly, to make inroads in his fight against his jealousy: he takes May Belle across the creek to Terabithia.

It is likely that the original book, by Katherine Paterson, is better able to address the subtleties of the story, and the morals it presents.  The youngsters attend church together, and there is a brief discussion about belief and dogma, couched in the language of children, between Jesse, May Belle, and Leslie.

Leslie is presented as an almost angelic girl, quite unnecessarily, in my opinion.  Part of the reason for that is the intense personality of the young actress herself (AnnaSophia Robb), who is ethereally beautiful, in the Hollywood tradition of a character who is destined for premature death.  The book and the movie are based on actual events, in the life of the director of the movie, it so happens.  While the story is a great vehicle for animation and graphics, and the graphics do manage to convey the idea that the fights are essentially imaginary, the fantastic element of the story is a little too subtle to be conveyed by a movie alone.  Still, it is an excellent movie for young adults, and one can hardly imagine it being executed any better than it is.