![]() While Jesse lives a carefree life exploring the world like Peter Pan, Miles has lived a lifetime and watched his wife and children die. ![]() The character Miles Tuck embodies the downside of it. The movie is rather slowly paced, but it explores all the benefits and liabilities of living forever. Think the Disney version of “Anne of Green Gables” meets “Highlander”. It explores the themes of immortality in a slightly different package than you’d normally expect. I wasn’t familiar with the original book or the movie before I viewed this DVD, so I was pleasantly surprised to find this entertaining story. “Tuck Everlasting” is rated PG for some violence. A man with a dark past knows the Tuck’s secret and will do anything to gain immortality for himself. However, the problem of eternal life and its implications isn’t the only thing threatening their blossoming romance. They keep her from returning home in order to make her see the necessity of keeping the spring a secret.Īs Winnie’s family desperately searches for her, Winnie and Jesse begin to fall in love. ![]() The source of their everlasting life is a spring flowing from an old tree. The Tuck family has a secret that they don’t want Winnie to tell. There she encounters a young man by the name of Jesse Tuck and his family. One day while walking in the woods her father owns she becomes lost. Tired of her mother’s prim and proper ways, she longs to get out and have fun in the world. In the end, despite the changes and the teen romance, it is a worthy adaptation and does a fine job with the themes Babbitt explored.In the early 1900’s, Winnie Foster is a young teenager who lives with her rich, domineering parents. I'm sure the temptation was otherwise for some Disney execs, but Winnie ends up having more sense than Bella Swann did. Thankfully, the film keeps the book's bittersweet ending. Now that Hurt has passed away, his commentary about "not fearing death, but only the unlived life" has an added poignancy to it. The signature scene of the book, with Angus and Winnie out on the lake in a rowboat and discussing the nature of life and mortality ("the wheel"), is the highlight of the movie and beautifully acted by Hurt and Bledel. You wouldn't expect Scott Bairstow of all people to give the best performance in the film, but the scene where he anguishingly tells Winnie their family history and his personal tragedy is a genuine tearjerker. In the book he's more accepting of it and seems to have an existential understanding, but in the film, he's a brooding death-seeker who keeps fighting in wars to try and die (and failing every time). One aspect, in my opinion, the film improved on the book is the tragedy of older Tuck son Miles, who had a wife and two children before he realized his immortality and thus ended up losing them through fear (his wife left with the kids after thinking her husband was in league with the Devil) and then to death while he just kept going on. (There's also narration from Elisabeth Shue of all people.) Plus, in an inspired addition from the book, his interest in Winnie has an unpleasantly lecherous edge that makes you all the more uncomfortable whenever he comes into the picture. All three acquit themselves well, but especially Kingsley, who does polite menace exceedingly well. The film certainly has acting pedigree with no less that three Oscar-winning greats featured Willam Hurt and Sissy Spacek as Angus and Mae Tuck and Ben Kingsley as the mysterious Man in the Yellow Suit (no real name given) who is pursuing the Tucks and the spring for his own nefarious means. It gets dangerously close to "Twilight" territory at points, but Bledel and Jackson do well enough to save it and make it tolerable. The biggest change, of course, is aging Winnie up from the 10-year old of the book to a 15 year old in order to cast "Gilmore Girls"-era Alexis Bledel in the role (in her film debut as well) and thus give her a starry-eyed teen romance with younger Tuck son Jesse (Jonathan Jackson). Despite the Disney effect and notable changes, it's a fairly well done adaptation. Given my longtime fascination with the immortality concept, it was a favorite of mine growing up and thus the 2002 adaptation by Disney held some interest for me (there was also an obscure 1981 version that I remember seeing in school). If you've been a kid at any point in the last few decades, you're likely familiar with Natalie Babbitt's 1975 tome about young Winnie Foster who, at the dawn of the 20th century, encounters the immortal Tuck family and the Fountain of Youth-type spring that made them so, causing her to question whether to become like them or live out her mortal life.
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