Brendan Fraser Stars, and Book’s Characters Leap From the Page, Literally
A.O. Scott
“Inkheart,” a muddled film adaptation of a children’s best seller by Cornelia Funke, celebrates the magic of books, but it can also be taken as a cautionary tale.
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“Inkheart,” a muddled film adaptation of a children’s best seller by Cornelia Funke, celebrates the magic of books, but it can also be taken as a cautionary tale. One of its main bibliophiles, Mortimer Folchart (Brendan Fraser), known as Mo, possesses the marvelous power to animate the written word. When he reads aloud, the story literally comes alive, as characters and objects pop (or rather tremble) from the page into the real world. Impressive magic, to be sure, but it costs poor Mo his wife (Sienna Guillory) and forces him to give up reading bedtime stories to his young daughter, Meggie (Eliza Hope Bennett).

Mo is what’s known in the densely populated, thinly imagined world of “Inkheart” as a silvertongue, and the film, anchored as it is in the juvenile fantasy genre, refrains from exploring some interesting implications of his unusual ability. Is it limited to children’s literature? Does it apply equally to cookbooks, erotica and the daily newspaper?

A briefly glimpsed copy of “Anna Karenina” put me in mind of “The Kugelmass Episode,” the immortal Woody Allen sketch in which the title character pursues an affair, across fictional Yonville and actual Manhattan, with Emma Bovary. But while “Inkheart” alludes to a few classic works like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Huckleberry Finn,” it is mainly concerned with characters who escape from a novel called “Inkheart.”

That book’s author, Fenoglio (Jim Broadbent), complains that it has gone out of print and all but vanished into obscurity, and frankly it’s not hard to see why. Though its full plot remains elusive, the “Inkheart” within “Inkheart” seems like a hodgepodge of ersatz medievalism dressed up with dreary magic.

One villain has escaped from the book, a fellow named Capricorn (Andy Serkis), who occupies himself in the modern, nonfictional world by playing Mussolini in a picturesque Italian hill town, surrounded by minions who have also crawled out of Fenoglio’s pages. There is also a fire juggler named Dustfinger (Paul Bettany), who is eventually outfitted with two sidekicks, one a ferret and the other a minor character from “The Arabian Nights.”

The movie “Inkheart,” directed by Iain Softley (“K-PAX,” “The Wings of the Dove”) from a script by David Lindsay-Abaire, aims for a blend of whimsy and tingly suspense but botches nearly every spell it tries to cast. Its opening scenes are more confusing than intriguing, and the acceleration of the plot leads to a sense of busyness rather than suspense. A movie that can produce the image of Helen Mirren astride a unicorn has some claim on the audience’s interest, and a movie that can make that image seem perfectly uninteresting is in some serious trouble.

Ms. Mirren plays Mo’s wealthy, reclusive, bibliomaniacal aunt, and she is hardly the only member of the cast who seems stranded in the film’s hectic, fussy, unconvincing world. Mr. Bettany, alternately seething and sulking, shows some of the same earnest, misplaced intensity he displayed in “The Da Vinci Code,” a film that makes only slightly less sense than this one.

Curiously, Mr. Bettany’s real-life wife, Jennifer Connelly, appears in his character’s dreams, beseeching him to come home. Of course she means come home to “Inkheart,” the book from which poor Dustfinger has been exiled. But given the story’s deliberate blending of the fantastic and the literal, she might also have meant come home from “Inkheart,” a movie that squanders far too much of its magic.

“Inkheart” is rated PG (Parental guidance suggested). It has some scenes of fairy tale peril and fantasy violence.