The BFG marks the first summit meeting between two giants who have overshadowed the childhoods of everyone born since 1960: Roald Dahl, whose sharp-edged, grimly funny tales for children have sold some 200m copies, and Steven Spielberg, whose less sharp-edged, sweetly funny films for children (and adults) have grossed more than £6bn in total. The more astringent sensibility belongs, of course, to Dahl: one born of boarding-school bullying, extreme heroism in the second world war as a fighter ace and the death of a beloved child (to whom he dedicated The BFG). Plus an inherited Scandinavian worldview of considerable bleakness. By comparison, Spielberg’s Eisenhower-era suburban sunbelt upbringing seems cheerful and optimistic.
Yet their sensibilities do somewhat mesh together in The BFG. Spielberg’s children are always marked by loss or absence, be it of parents or means, and they, like Dahl’s protagonists, are in the business of felling bullies and triumphing over adult meanies. Dahl’s heroine, Sophie, is a lonely young girl plucked from her bed in an orphanage by the titular behemoth, and carried off to Giant Land, his home, lest she alert the normal world to the presence of giants. He’s kind, a bit disgusting (he likes his fart-inducing green beer), and is as insignificant in his own world as Sophie is in ours; the other giants call him Runt and use him as punching-bag and comic foil. Two underdogs on one team, it’s no wonder Spielberg signed up.
Respectfully acknowledging the book’s holy place in childhood memory, Spielberg has not departed from the broad visual scheme laid out in Quentin Blake’s original illustrations. Blake’s giant is, visually at least, also Spielberg’s. But he is now also Mark Rylance’s, and here is the film’s galvanising mechanism. The BFG shares a common core with Rooster, Rylance’s epoch-making trickster-troubadour-tout in Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, which also delved deep into ancient English myths and pagan archetypes. As The BFG movie drifts and bloats at times, Rylance comes as a relief, a rock to hold on to as the movie fails to tighten up or bare its teeth. His CGI-rendered face cannot hide a performance of sublime subtlety and his delivery gives a near-Shakespearean richness to Dahl’s towering, lovable bumpkin.
In the end, though, Dahl’s darker sensibility caves to Spielberg’s, whose kinder, gentler tendencies, overheated visuals and soaring John Williams scores have been known to bulldoze over many a project (think: Tintin, Hook, The Color Purple, War Horse). In the end, sweetness trumps nasty once more.
