The director and two screenwriters who are responsible for Harriet the Spy have, to this point in their careers, been television people. Director Bronwen Hughes has worked for "The Kids in the Hall" and really made her reputation directing commercials for such megacorps as Toyota, McDonalds, Rubbermaid, and Canon. Screenwriter Douglas Petrie is headwriter for Nickelodeon's "Clarissa Explains it All For You," and his collaborator, Theresa Rebeck, has written for "LA Law" and "NYPD Blue," among other series. Harriet is the first feature film for all of them.
There's a significant difference between the two media, TV and film.
Commercials as drama are a sprint, problems and solutions unfolding in 30 seconds; sitcoms are more a middle distance run, a bit longer but still, everything is there in 22 minutes, all the classical elements, exposition, conflict, development, climax, resolution.
Feature films, however, are more grueling, a dramatic marathon and, while the creative team behind Harriet certainly have distinguished themselves in television, they don't seem to have the stamina for the longer form. This is particularly evident in the fact that they don't seem able to sustain an interesting story; in fact, the first half of the film seems to lack focus altogether, as if the movie is struggling to find something to be about, picking up first this thread, then dropping it for that thread and then dropping that thread for still another. Then, when the film finally finds a plot at about the halfway point, it seems slight. Finally, at the end, it's as if the scriptwriters ran out of steam altogether and decided, we've done 25 miles, that's almost a marathon, what say we call it even and slap a happy ending on it?
Based on the 1964 Louise Fitzhugh bestseller and critically acclaimed novel of the same name, the movie centers on 11-year-old Harriet M. Welsch (Michelle Trachtenberg), who has designs on being a great writer. Her nanny, Golly (Rosie O'Donnell) advised her that to do that she needed to pay attention to the world. "I learn everything I can," Harriet says early on, "and write down everything I learn."
For the first half of the film, she wanders the city, spying on people, climbing on roofs to look through skylights and into the windows of people's homes; she sneaks down alleys to look into the windows of the backrooms of shops, and once even sneaks into the home of a wealthy recluse (Eartha Kitt). Everything she sees, she writes in her notebook.
Unfortunately for her, at about the halfway point, she loses her notebook in a city park, where it's found by one of her classmates, who reads the contents aloud to the rest of their classmates. What's in it is not pretty. About one shy boy, Harriet has written, "If I were him I wouldn't want to go on living." About one of her best friends, a girl named Janie, she's noted, "She gives me the creeps; when she grows up she could turn out to be a crazy person." About her other best friend, she's written, "Sport is so poor, he can't even afford to buy food."
The children turn on Harriet, tormenting her, and she takes revenge onthem, deliberately humiliating even those who had been her friends. Janie has ambitions of being a great scientist, but Harriet deliberately ruins one of her experiments. Sport, who indeed is poor, has to run the household for himself and his starving-artist father; Harriet takes a photograph of him wearing an apron and dusting, photocopies it and posts it all over the school with a mocking caption.
Setting aside the fact that Harriet is a voyeur and a vengeful brat and that she's guilty (at least) of illegal entry and elsewhere destruction of property, the film is about as slight as a sitcom, one of those family-centered shows in which the child brings home a bad report card, has to face a bully at recess, loses her best friend to the new rich girl, and then, in the end learns a lesson--hard work bears good grades, the bully is just a frightened, friendless kid himself, the rich girl is just lonely.
For 22 minutes, it might be enough of a pay-off--the minor problem, the easy fix, the moral lesson that makes the recorded audience track go "Aw" at the end when the child brings the bully home and says, "Do you want to play with my new baseball glove?"
But for an hour and a half?
No.
There's a certain irony to the narrowness of the film. Harriet keeps saying she wants to experience strange people and cultures. "I want to experience the whole world and write it down," she says. And yet, the focus of the drama is the sixth-grade-as-be-all-and-end-all-of- the-world-and-no-one-likes-me-anymore.
Maybe the filmmakers should have set off into the great wide world with their notebooks, seen what there was to see out there, and written that down.
Then perhaps we'd have a film that could go the distance.
by Joe Schuster
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