![]() This garden is a hothouse fantasy of digital wonderment, to which Mary is introduced by a borderline-irritating laptop-generated robin redbreast. It appears to be the size of Yorkshire itself or even the Amazon rainforest. As for the garden, well, the word garden doesn’t really cover it. It is pretty much the size of Blenheim Palace, surreally marooned in the middle of nowhere. The mansion itself has been supersized – rather like Manderley in the new Netflix Rebecca – and this movie incidentally adds some comparable melodrama to the house’s destiny as well. Finally there is the saturnine, miserable and hunchbacked Uncle Archibald, who has something of Heathcliff and Mr Rochester in his DNA – and he is played with a gulped growl by Colin Firth. Isis Davies plays the maid Martha, who is sympathetic but will stand for no nonsense and Amir Wilson plays her brother Dickon. Mary comes to Yorkshire and on the train journey is confronted by the ferocious housekeeper Mrs Medlock, robustly played by Julie Walters, although without much dialogue for her to get her teeth into. Growling … Colin Firth as Uncle Archibald. Mary is played by 14-year-old Dixie Egerickx, and she does bring the right kind of ingenuous, tomboyish confidence and innocent boldness – the way I imagine Lucy Pevensie from the Narnia stories. This movie updates the novel’s action from before the first world war to the tumult of Indian partition in 1947. ![]() We certainly aren’t treated to a ghastly flashback. Mary uses the secret garden’s miraculous Edenic powers to restore the health of Colin, who had quite wrongly been encouraged to think of himself as bedridden – and the garden promises to be a restorative force, curing the family’s wounds and salving painful memories.Īnd as for the details behind Mary’s aunt tragically dying in the secret garden … er, how exactly? Was it the same sort of gardening accident that carried off Spinal Tap’s first drummer John “Stumpy” Pepys? Well, the film is a tiny bit reticent about the exact moment-by-moment details, and, as with the Spinal Tap case, it is perhaps best left unsolved. Mary scampishly finds her way in and chivvies her uncle’s neurotic disabled son Colin (Mary’s cousin, in fact) to come with her into this garden along with her new friend, the maidservant’s 12-year-old brother, Dickon. But Mary discovers that there is on his estate a marvellous secret walled garden, which Uncle Archibald has locked up ever since his wife died there.
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