In The Borrowers, Goodman plays a lawyer named Ocious P. Potter (presumably after the loathsome banker in 1946's It's a Wonderful Life). At his best Goodman is worth his weight in pratfalls -- his Potter is a ruddy slime stuffed into a pinstriped suit. He has a peculiarly well-matched antagonist in the great British character actor Jim Broadbent, who plays Pod Clock, the head of a Borrower family. Broadbent's hilarious declamatory style cuts through the film like a foghorn. When Pod goes on a borrowing raid, pillaging a household for supplies, the effects are snappy and ingenious; the Borrowers improvise Rube Goldberg-style climbing machines before our eyes. But some of the comedy is crude and (literally) cheesy, and the film has nary a trace of emotion. At 83 minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome, but it doesn't stay with you either. From its humble beginnings in the family kitchen to its cliffhanger climax in the cheese-works of a dairy, The Borrowers is almost as hyperactive as a Hong Kong action film. It's high-caloric filmmaking.
Quaintness and nostalgia are built into Norton's original stories, which have the intricate decoration of Victorian dollhouses, complete with props such as miniature books and eyebrow combs. In the opening pages of the first Borrowers tale, she writes, "Nowadays, I suppose, if [Borrowers] exist at all, you would only find them in houses which are old and quiet and deep in the country -- and where the human beings live to a routine. Routine is their safeguard. They must know which rooms are to be used and when. They do not stay long where there are careless people, or unruly children, or certain household pets." On the assumption that no '90s moviegoer would sit still for such a dulcet setting, this version of The Borrowers shatters all routine immediately. Potter swindles away the ancestral manse of the (yes) Lender family. He pockets their aunt's last will and testament and prepares to demolish the house to make room for a plush apartment complex. He doesn't realize that he's catalyzing an unprecedented partnership -- between the Lenders' son Pete (Bradley Pierce) and a slew of Borrowers headed by the Clocks.
The result is a helter-skelter chase movie the pacing and gestalt of which owe more to Toy Story than to Norton's children's classics. On the plus side, director Peter Hewitt (Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey) has a talent for mischievous storybook imagery. It's no small achievement for the film's extraordinary amount of "product placement" to register amusingly, not oppressively, from the Johnson & Johnson's dental floss that Pod uses as rope to the Wisk bottle that serves as his family's traveling case.
The original book is set in an old village; here the Lenders live in a brickish and brackish region of a semirehabilitated metropolitan area. Characters such as a policeman and an exterminator have the blocky, overly neat look of the friendly narrators in grade-school educational pamphlets. The Borrowers' cunning, makeshift furniture and costuming always give you visual goods to savor. What redeems the sketchy flirtation between Pod's daughter (Flora Newbigin) and a streetwise Borrower named Spiller (Raymond Pickard) -- the homebound Clocks are "innies"; Spiller is an "outtie" -- is the latter's marvelous roller-skate hot rod.
Unfortunately there's no thread of feeling to bind all the clever bits together -- despite Broadbent's inventive, funny performance. I love how he explains "the Borrower way" in a furry kind of bellow. (A Borrower is, among other things, quiet, alert, ingenious, brave, and "very good at climbing.") But the calmer miniseries gave Ian Holm, in the same role, the chance to sustain a haunting note of furtive anxiety. The movie version primes you to root for the Borrowers but doesn't make you care for them. Even in this ultrakinetic form, Norton's very little people may provide us "normal" humans with a ticklish explanation for any small thing lost around the house. But what the moviemakers have lost is initially inconspicuous, ultimately crucial: a respect for childhood things in all their innocent simplicity.
The Borrowers.
Directed by Peter Hewitt. Written by Gavin Scott and John Kamps. Based on the novels of Mary Norton. Starring John Goodman and Jim Broadbent.
