A Garden to Remember.

Agnieszka Holland's temperament is bright, her instincts are theatrical, and her subject matter is oppression. When she made a movie about a Jewish boy shuttling between the World War II armies of Russia and Germany and constantly switching his allegiance from communism to fascism and back again in a desperate effort to stay alive, she portrayed the story's horrors directly enough, yet the result is far from grim. The film might have been called The Wild Body rather than Europa, Europa: the hero leaps naked from his bath to escape Nazi thugs on "crystal night," later leaps from another bath to keep a homosexual would-be seducer from seeing his circumcised penis, and keeps bounding into and out of the arms of women who might desire him when he is a clothed German only to betray him when he is a naked Jew. In Europa, Europa, Holland made an unnerving comedy about survival within the hell of race hatred, and her instinct to render her subject with equal measures of lyricism, mordancy, and gallows humor fulfills itself in the boy's nightmare of Stalin and Hitler waltzing together amid the havoc their ideologies perpetrate.

It was an unlikely but happy inspiration to assign this Polish director of harrowing adult movies to direct the British children's classic, The Secret Garden. Her pity and her flamboyance insured that this wouldn't be another embalmed adaptation of a much-loved book. She has made not so much a children's movie as another Agnieszka Holland film about life dancing within, and finally out of, the jaws of death. This is a very faithful adaptation because in Frances Hodgson Bumett of Manchester, England, Agnieszka Holland of Warsaw, Poland, has met a soulmate.

Garden's heroine, Mary Lennox, is no political refugee, yet she, too, in a way, is a victim of ideology, a domestic ideology that might be expressed as "children must be adornments to their parents and class or else invisible." Born in nineteenth-century India to two bright young members of the British Raj, Mary is handed over to native servants who keep her well out of the way of her partying parents. It is duty and pleasure to the Lennoxes to be social stars, and any child of Mary's homeliness and bad temper could only be an impediment to their social progress. When that progress, along with their lives, is buried beneath rubble during an earthquake, the little survivor is sent to live in the home of her mother's twin sister in Yorkshire.

Quite a home. The aunt turns out to be dead, her widower, Lord Craven, is a morbid recluse, and a hard-bitten housekeeper has charge of Misselthwaite Manor. The hallways echo with strange cries and a certain garden is kept locked behind high walls. Mary investigates and makes two discoveries: she has a little cousin, Colin, supposedly crippled, who is being cosseted to death. And the secret garden is to be the salvation of both children. For the garden was the scene of the aunt's accidental death and therefore Lord Craven hates it. Only by breaking into the garden and making herself its restorer can Mary unwarp both her spirit and the body of her cousin.

To call The Secret Garden D.H. Lawrence for kids would be smart alecky but not inaccurate. Mrs. Burnett shared with Lawrence certain beliefs: the restorative powers of nature, the essential goodness of instinct, the need to fight the deformations of a biologically parched society. Holland responds to all this and to everything else in the book--the Gothic spookiness, the socially complicated struggles between heroine and household staff, the near animism of the garden cure, the scorn for the quackery of Colin's medical treatment, the Dickensian pathos of the final reunion--wholeheartedly and with theatrical panache. Though Holland's cinematic style is conventional enough in terms of camera placement and cutting (when she wants to suggest the complementary natures of the cousins in their first meeting, she can think of nothing better than alternating close-ups), she is resourceful when it comes to large groupings, costuming, and props. Although the entry on Holland in the Dateline Encyclopedia of Film lists only cinematic schooling, most of the best moments here, and in Europa, Europa, suggest a stage talent stimulated by the resources of film. I don't write this in disparagement; Ingmar Bergman has always struck me the same way. I won't soon forget:

The very first shot of Mary being dressed as if she were a mannequin by her Indian servants: a little girl robotized by the very hierarchy that is supposed to exalt her above the natives.

The first view of Colin, so buried in his invalid's bedding that he seems to be trapped in a cocoon.

The hilarious but slightly scary sight of the entire manor staff, assembled at the newly emboldened Colin's behest, every face covered by a surgical mask.

Especially stirring: Mary, looking over a railing, bids a fond farewell to her cousin as he walks down a huge staircase. But then the camera shifts a little to the left to reveal the formidable housekeeper, Mrs. Medlock, ascending and glaring up at Mary. In a white nightgown, Colin is a pale wraith disappearing into darkness. In her red wrapper, Mrs. Medlock is an avenging splash of blood.

That last shot not only indicates Holland's skill but a tendency to overreach for the sake of flashing effects. What is the puritanical, mingy Medlock doing in that flamboyant get-up? Well, getting a sharp intake of breath from the audience, certainly, but still ....

But the film's most problematic feature is its resolution, a problem that is also in the novel. Once the children have renewed the garden, only the capitulation of Lord Craven to love and duty remains to be accomplished. Mrs. Hodgson brings this about by stressing the telepathic bond between father and son. It's a rather too mystical resolution, especially since most of the preceding drama has proceeded from the interaction of characters and acts of free will. But Holland, ever faithful to her source, seizes this opportunity to stage a vivid and amusing bit of hocus-pocus in which Colin calls across continents to his straying father. In the 1949 M.G.M. version (good but largely inferior to Holland' s), scriptwriter Robert Ardrey came up with a much more muscular, more truly dramatic device. Ardrey made it explicit that, since the mother was killed in a fall from a tree, Lord Craven's hatred of nature (and of life itself, focused on that tree. But as the centerpiece of the garden, it is the object of his son's love. When Craven advances upon that tree, ax in hand, at the climax of Ardrey's script, he hears the pleas of his son. Does he then avenge himself on nature, thereby destroying still another member of his family, or does he accept the fact that the natural world both destroys and restores, takes yet gives? Thus, the outcome turns upon a decision and therefore a true climax, while the Holland version, with its vaporish aristocrat simply yielding to the tug of his son's love, is a capitulation rather than a climax. To be sure, it is the Holland version that is truer to the book, but this only shows that adaptors shouldn't be afraid to improve upon their original.

The actors, with one exception, couldn't be better. Andrew Knott, as Dickon, Mary's nature-boy assistant, is pleasant but can't project the essential image of the character: Pan in trousers. But Kate Maberly as Mary gives perhaps the most deliberately uningratiating performance I've ever seen from a child actor. Her tight little face and wary eyes repel the easy affection we want to feel for children and force us to take the moral struggle of her character as seriously as we would that of any adult. You end up liking Mary and cheering her on but only after Maberly illuminates the girl's hard-won triumph over her own emotional meagerness. It's an astonishingly disciplined performance from one so young. Heydon Prowse makes Colin magnetic and funny even in the little hypochondriac's most hysterical moments. Given the peculiarity of Holland's conception of Lord Craven (Swinburuian tresses, silken moustache, tapering figure), John Lynch does quite well. (But Herbert Marshall's bottled-up fury in the M.G.M. version was closer to the mark.) And grand Maggie Smith rightly keeps Mrs. Medlock from being a one-dimensional monster by registering the frustration and the warped but very real sense of duty within the domestic tyrant.

But the most memorable appearance here is Laura Crosley's as Martha the maid, a performance that may be either acting or merely a genius stroke of casting. Is Ms. Crosley a real actress or simply the most irresistible female adolescent on the face of the earth? Only time, and subsequent movies will tell. Meanwhile, I don't want to analyze her performance. I would much prefer to kiss her.