Rated G for Bland

For Addie's birthday, we tried a wildly new and different thing: I took her to a movie. All three of our kids are oversensitive to onscreen tension. Seeing as everything in the theater is large and loud, it's definitely not Addie's ideal retreat. (Rachelle can sympathize.) But I read up several reviews, and decided to risk it. She and I went to see "Kit Kittredge."

It was not an interesting movie.

Granted, we were the wrong ages: Addie should have been older and I should have been younger. And two or three of the actors, including Abigail Breslin as Kit, were fun to watch. Still, the movie was terribly earnest. The scriptwriters were concerned with the plot, the message, and Kit's adorable color-coordinated 1930s outfits. Anything else, like enjoyable dialogue or entertaining sequences, was obviously very low priority.

Two aspects of the movie annoyed me. Firstly, that less-fortunate people are innately good. The scapgoats in "Kit" were the hobos. Only Kit and her mother could look past the ragged clothes and see the hearts of gold underneath. Everyone else was presented as holding completely unreasonable prejudices against these poor hobos.

Yes, there were some heart-of-gold people thrown into the hobo life, and wrongly shunned by society (although I didn't realize it was such a brand of shame of that era). But hobos were also depressed and desperate people. It wasn't a safe society for obviously well-to-do young children to move in. I was in full sympathy with the mother who forbade her son from returning to the "hobo jungle," even though the movie villainized her for it.

Now I've made myself out to sound like a good middle-class uncharitable snob. My point isn't that we decent folk should sneer at the less-fortunate. My point is that judging anyone by their clothes and circumstances is wrong. The accepted Hollywood maxim that Poor People Are Nice and Rich People Are Mean isn't any nobler than the more usual assumption that nice clothes equals a nice person.

The second irritation was that the movie was set in the jolly Depression. Sure, people lose their jobs and houses. Sure, Kit's father has to leave to find work, leaving Kit and her mother to take in boarders. But everybody has such a good time living together! Even the hobo jungle looks cool! Further confirming the impression that we don't really understand what the Depression entailed were all the reviews I read beforehand. At least three of them mentioned that the setting of the movie "reflected current times in America." Okay. You're saying that high gas prices, an increased rate of foreclosures, and high food prices "reflect" a time when 25% of the popoulation was jobless? When kids put cardboard in the bottoms of their shoes because the soles were wearing through? When you ate oatmeal every day, not for the fiber, but because you had nothing else? Not one reviewer said, "The movie reminds us that our times are a pale reflection of what our grandparents went through." Poor struggling moviegoers, who just blew $20 for a movie and snacks!

Possibly the movie improved when it got into the second half: we didn't make it that far. Addie was slumped down in her chair, moaning about boredom, so we left halfway through. She got back to the van and snatched up one of her new books, and was happy again.

Next week: Sara, who always takes movies too seriously, comments on the cultural ramifications of the Three Stooges!

-- SJ