‘A Monster Calls’: Talking Trees Are Easy. Truth Is Hard.

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/12/movies/a-monster-calls-j-a-bayona-patrick-ness.html

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It is no surprise that children, to whom so much is yet unknown, are often afraid of the dark and all the mysteries it hides in the shadows beneath the bed or behind closet doors. But Conor O’Malley, the young protagonist of J. A. Bayona’s “A Monster Calls,” is 12, old enough to have opened the closet door, looked under the bed and devoured scary monster movies like “Godzilla.”

So in the gloom of 12:07 a.m., when an ancient yew rips itself from the ground behind his Irish home with the nightmare sound of 100 haunted-house doors splitting apart, Conor’s only response is a vaguely annoyed scowl.

Switching tactics, the towering fire-eyed beast makes Conor an unexpected deal: He will tell the boy three true stories, then Conor (Lewis MacDougall) will tell him the true and shameful story of the real fears the boy dares not speak, the ones he, his stern grandmother (Sigourney Weaver), and his dying mother (Felicity Jones) keep avoiding.

In most kids’ films, the monster is a fantastical threat roused from the darkest, deepest depths. In Mr. Bayona’s tough-minded film about grief, the monster’s purpose is to shine a light on a child’s most real and rational fears. On the level of both story and narrative form, “A Monster Calls” confronts a universal adult dilemma: how much should adults, whether family or filmmakers, soften hard truths for children?

The popular children’s writer Patrick Ness adapted the screenplay from his 2011 novel of the same name, which Jessica Bruder, reviewing it for The New York Times, called “powerful medicine: a story that lodges in your bones and stays there.” The book was inspired by an idea left behind by the novelist Siobhan Dowd, who died of cancer before she could complete it, and by Mr. Ness’s own childhood memories of well-intentioned lies and convenient half-truths.

“As a young person, I was never told the truth,” Mr. Ness said over lunch in Midtown with Mr. Bayona. “It was always: The bully is really going to end up your best friend. He’s actually quite sensitive. School is the best years of your life. Don’t worry, you’ll grow out of it.”

Mr. Ness said he was “a little gay white suburban kid from Tacoma, Wash.,” and became a novelist, in part, because books confided, while adults hid. “Kids know more than we would like them to know,” he said. “The reaction is often: Let’s pretend that they don’t know it since they shouldn’t. Shouldn’t is a harmful thing. The immoral action is to not engage, to leave them to face it alone, which is what kids end up doing.”

Conor has already weathered his parents’ divorce, his father’s on-off involvement in his life, and the arrival of his mother’s cancer. His mother swears it’s going to be O.K. So does everyone else, except for the bully who beats him into oblivion daily. Conor is less in the dark than anyone might think, and he has enough experience to distrust the happy endings of adults’ comforting tales.

In children’s and young-adult literature, stories that grapple with the often unsettling emotions of children are hardly rare, but wide-release films made for kids still tend to stick to comedy, or offer fantasies of pint-size, one-dimensional heroes who overcome mean enemies and fulfill their triumphant destinies. When the death of a loved one does define a character, as with Harry Potter or Spider-Man, that grief is typically redefined as the origin story for spectacular, world-saving heroism. In “A Monster Calls,” the title monster is not slain or sacrificed to provide such metaphorical closure. In complete violation of Hollywood formula, the monster lives, the mother dies.

As Mr. Ness considered adapting his unusual story, he said there were “a few voices, saying maybe we should soften it, maybe the mother shouldn’t die.” To maintain control, he wrote a spec script on his own, “hoping a filmmaker would respond, and one did.”

Mr. Bayona, whose adult films “The Orphanage” and “The Impossible” featured children in dire circumstances, said there were few contemporary live-action children’s films that he admired. “Ninety-nine percent of the movies about kids, there’s no complexity in the psychology,” Mr. Bayona said. “When they grow up, they suffer to accept that uncertainty, that things can be black and white at the same time.”

Mr. Ness’s script, by contrast, reminded him of some of his favorite films. “Spielberg invented the mainstream drama for kids in ‘E.T.’,” he said. “It talks about childhood in a very serious way. I love those movies, but they don’t do them anymore.”

Mr. Bayona said he was surprised to realize that the most psychologically complex films for children tended to be animated. He cited Brad Bird’s “The Iron Giant” (“a great film that talks about death in an accessible way, with fantasy”), the work of Hayao Miyazaki (“Howl’s Moving Castle”), and Pixar’s “Up” and “Inside Out.”

“A Monster Calls” keys into an angrier emotional register than many of those films. Mr. Bayona allows Conor to fume and rage, and to lash out at his family members, who often have no clue what to say or do.

Sigourney Weaver, who plays Conor’s harsh grandmother, said the film jibed with the sensibility of Maurice Sendak, who wrote “Where the Wild Things Are.” “He really felt that children were very interested in the dark and the light,” she said, “and that to sanitize things for them, as I think he thought Disney did, was not respectful of the complex people they are.”

In the end, Conor’s monster — whose own stories reflect a world that is unfair, inconsistent and disordered — is never slain, and Conor plunges deeper into his own darkness, admitting his own ugly caregiver guilt: that, no matter how much he loves her, he also sometimes wishes that his mother would die so it could finally be over.

“Conor comes to acknowledge you can feel something at the same time as feeling the opposite,” Mr. Ness said.

The film has already broken box-office records in Mr. Bayona’s native Spain. But it will be interesting to see how such a complex children’s film, uninspired by emoticons or board games or talking pets, performs at the American box office. The filmmakers argue that it is particularly timely, given the way many parents are struggling to explain the drumbeat of disturbing daily news to their children.

“The monster says, ‘How can a king be a murderer and be loved by his people?’ And ‘kingdoms get the princes they deserve.’” Mr. Bayona said. “That’s very relevant right now, just a few blocks away from here.”

Mr. Bayona was referring to President-elect Donald J. Trump, but Mr. Ness said, “That was a line about George W., by the way,” written in after Mr. Bush’s 2004 re-election and amid the war in Iraq. He noted that the recent election revealed that plenty of adults have feelings that would be familiar to children like Conor.

“To be young is to feel injustice,” Mr. Ness said. “Particularly at 12, 13, 14, you are given many of the responsibilities of an adult and none of the privileges. The sense of injustice is huge, and life often feels like a cheat. Well, that doesn’t stop. Life often feels like a cheat.”