Books, Arts & Manners: Providing for the Young

HAVING more or less put aside childish things, I am not overfond of films for young people. Here, however, are three worth commending. True, when a movie calls itself Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, you can be reasonably sure it will have as little to do with Kipling as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had to do with Mary Shelley. So The Jungle Book becomes a love story between Mowgli, the jungle boy, and Kitty, the daughter of the commander of the army post from which the boy had vanished as a child. Still, if a film has a romance between a girl brought up by the highest Victorian standards and a boy brought up by wolves; a buried treasure city to which evil English subalterns want Mowgli to lead them before they kill him; wonderful animals (awesome tiger, comical ape, scampering wolves, endless serpent); and racy location photography, only a curmudgeon would carp about not getting much Kipling.

And if there’s no Kipling, there’s the next-best thing: John Cleese bumbling as blitheringly as ever. Besides, Kipling’s jungle always seemed to me more ecumenical than most, blithely containing fauna from diverse continents. Then why not also clichés from all over? The story scrambles along scrappily under Stephen Sommers’s workmanlike direction, and India, jungles and all, looks as photogenic as ever. Jason Scott Lee may be ethnically unconvincing as Mowgli, but otherwise winning enough, and Lena Headey is the most endearingly spunky of Victorian young ladies, Indian division.

JS

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John Simon

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HAVING more or less put aside childish things, I am not overfond of films for young people. Here, however, are three worth commending. True, when a movie calls itself Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, you can be reasonably sure it will have as little to do with Kipling as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein had to do with Mary Shelley. So The Jungle Book becomes a love story between Mowgli, the jungle boy, and Kitty, the daughter of the commander of the army post from which the boy had vanished as a child. Still, if a film has a romance between a girl brought up by the highest Victorian standards and a boy brought up by wolves; a buried treasure city to which evil English subalterns want Mowgli to lead them before they kill him; wonderful animals (awesome tiger, comical ape, scampering wolves, endless serpent); and racy location photography, only a curmudgeon would carp about not getting much Kipling.

And if there’s no Kipling, there’s the next-best thing: John Cleese bumbling as blitheringly as ever. Besides, Kipling’s jungle always seemed to me more ecumenical than most, blithely containing fauna from diverse continents. Then why not also clichés from all over? The story scrambles along scrappily under Stephen Sommers’s workmanlike direction, and India, jungles and all, looks as photogenic as ever. Jason Scott Lee may be ethnically unconvincing as Mowgli, but otherwise winning enough, and Lena Headey is the most endearingly spunky of Victorian young ladies, Indian division.