Directed by: Eli Roth
Starring: Jack Black, Cate Blanchett, Owen Vaccaro, Kyle MacLachlan
Rated PG, 104 minutes
In a late scene in the children’s comedy-fantasy “The House with a Clock in Its Walls,” the main character, an orphan sent to live with his warlock uncle in the titular estate, admits to having performed a dark magic spell that has put the house in serious danger. When asked how he was able to do so, he shrugs and says, “I followed the directions.” While the line is meant, ostensibly, as another offhand joke in a movie full of them, something in the sheepish delivery of this one reveals just how shaky the film’s premise is. Magic here is sometimes as simple as following the directions in a book of spells, but other times it’s unscripted and rooted in the feeling behind it; sometimes magic works with a wordless wave of the hand, and sometimes it requires a speech and a ceremony.
That it inconsistently plays with the rules of its universe and tears open its own plot holes certainly isn’t unique to “The House with a Clock in Its Walls,” but the lack of clarity is seemingly an affront to our protagonist. Lewis Barnavelt, a precocious child who reads dictionaries for fun and drops 15-letter words in casual conversation, is obsessed with precision and accuracy, yet the sorcery that forms the centerpiece of the movie is irregular and shadowy.
The problems with the movie begin to snowball from there. True, it’s easy enough to overlook some lax storytelling, but only if the characters and plot are interesting. Unfortunately, the plot boils down to a by-the-books battle between good and evil, and Lewis (Owen Vaccaro, “Daddy’s Home”) is an awful caricature of a child, a dimensionless vehicle for every exhausted movie cliché you can name. He falls asleep while studying, looks dramatically at a photograph, gets picked last in gym class; even his smile at being presented with a plate of cookies is exasperating in its lack of imagination. As envisioned by Eli Roth (“Hostel”), here directing his first family movie, all children more or less act the same.
The adults add some flair, at least. Playing the boy’s uncle, Jonathan Barnavelt, Jack Black (“School of Rock”) willingly makes himself a buffoon, an act he’s honed over the years, while Cate Blanchett (“Carol”), as Jonathan’s friend Florence, gives the movie’s most commanding performance as a witch struggling to get her magic back after suffering a terrible personal tragedy. When playing off each other, Black and Blanchett banter like Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn, and the dialogue in these scenes is written sharply to match. It’s a shame, then, that these two performances are wasted on a movie that also makes room for three different iterations of the same fart joke. Because lest you forget, this is a movie for kids, and in the estimable imagination of Eli Roth, kids just want fart jokes.
That the movie is based on a novel known for its Edward Gorey illustrations reveals yet another missed opportunity. Here, Roth shrugs off the iconic look of Gorey’s grimly nonsensical art in favor of totally unremarkable design and camerawork. The most Gorey-esque scenery in the movie comes in the occasional exterior shots of Lewis’s elementary school; whenever we see the building, there’s always a lone child frantically running up the steps, late for class. This minor detail is a welcome curiosity, but in such small doses these moments only remind us that the rest of the movie is devoid of them.
For all that it lacks, though, “The House with a Clock in Its Walls” is still a tolerable movie—the same way that, say, gas station sandwiches are still food, and middle seats on airplanes still get you to your destination. Whatever it does wrong (or doesn’t do at all), the movie follows a formula, and that formula works. Maybe Lewis is an empty shell of a protagonist, and maybe the sights and sounds of Jonathan’s house aren’t the source of wonderment that all the movie’s shots of dumbstruck gazes would indicate, but every plot point, every punchline, every twist and turn arrives exactly on time. You could do much worse, especially in the often condescending world of children’s movies. Of course, a movie that so casually shrugs off its commitment to imaginative storytelling can only inspire the same reaction from its audience.
Originally published in The Harvard Press on 9/28/18.