REVIEW: Swallows and Amazons (2016)

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Swallows and Amazons (2016) (PG)
Directed by: Philippa Lowthorpe
Adapted by: Andrea Gibb
From the book by: Arthur Ransome
Starring: (Grown-ups): Rafe Spall, Kelly Macdonald, Andrew Scott
(Swallows): Dane Hughes, Orla Hill, Teddie-Rose Malleson-Allen, Bobbie McCulloch,
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1227183/?ref_=nv_sr_1

This feels a little like a natives’ take on the adventures of the Swallows and Amazons. While I appreciate that liberties must be taken when adapting a book as a film, a whole subplot is added to proceedings here, based on Arthur Ransome’s connection with Russia, making Captain Flint (Rafe Spall) a bigger character, but it’s still very much Sunday afternoon film territory and, in some ways, the additions are not great – Jim Turner did not come across as a very good spy. A gun gets waved around, but the more believable and emotionally hard-hitting moment of peril was when Roger Walker fell overboard and John and Susan very quickly had to rescue him. It felt like a shame that the film couldn’t trust the book’s potent mix of children camping and sailing and their imaginative take on it.

There are other, smaller, changes, some successful, such as giving the adults a greater part (Kelly MacDonald is lovely as Mrs Walker and Jessica Haynes’s grumpy but kind Mrs Jackson is funny. I’d be grumpy if my Mr Jackson was Harry Enfield too, although the byplay between them and the children is good). It’s more about the Swallows than the Amazons, of course, and there’s an attempt to inject tension and give characters arcs: are they responsible enough to go sailing and camping on their own? John is in overall charge, but Roger has to prove he can swim and Able Seaman Walker has her night guarding the island, of course. I did get irritated at how incompetent they made Susan. I may need to reread the book, but I remember her as a bastion of competence from my childhood – not so here. And she has least of an arc, she’s just snapping at different siblings for different reasons throughout.

The camera laps up Bobby McCulloch as Roger, who really and truly is only little (and thus bringing in a subplot where guns are bandied about by spies feels tasteless). His desperation to prove he’s old enough to go along and be useful is palpable, and while you can understand John and Susan’s frustration, his two crying fits are sympathetic. Titty (I refuse to call her Tatty) is also a lively presence, the storyteller with the voiceover who names things and argues that this trip is ‘life and death’ and the Walkers’ destiny, reflecting her role in the book. I was glad to see that they gave her sympathy with John its due, given all the squabbling. There’s also, inevitably, some modern upspeaking and possibly anachronistic slang, while certain terms used in the book have vanished in a spirit of anti-colonialism.

But there are so many things that they get right – the look, the various locations and some characters – the encounter with the charcoal burners is just eerie enough. The Amazonians are suitably wild – I especially thought Hannah Jayne Thorp’s Peggy and her too-ready chatter was good. But I think it’s telling that the film ends with a tame party in which people dress up and not a proper battle, which is to say I’d recommend The BFG over this.