Insulting Oxymoron #273: The Great Depression!

Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (2008)

Rating ... B (61)

I've come to appreciate more kidpics than I anticipated, and the reason is not solely because I've seen The Cat in the Hat. I don't know the precise date of the schism but at some point in the past family films either became or were declared juvenile by the masses (undoubtedly a topic that coincides with the domination of multiplexes by adolescent and teenage boys) and thus less desirable despite being written, directed, and produced by adults. Of course, studios have little choice but to go with the flow in their response to target audience considerations, and as a result kidpics received an unofficial public appeal rating in accordance with their box office performance, which at the current moment stands somewhere between mild nuisance and leper colony. (Animated "family films" have traditionally fared better though ironically the target market is in essence the same, since it's not like children drive themselves to see How to Eat Fried Worms.)

As fortune would have it, the niche carved out by the contemporary kidpic has become unintentionally advantageous under the right circumstances. When given a topic as blatantly lose-lose as the Great Depression, to be frank I'd rather watch a kidpic that tackles the subject as opposed to an awardsy drama. The implicit requirement of a kidpic to remain upbeat (at least to some degree) in order to please audiences in light of it concerning difficult situations often produces an appropriate feeling of bittersweetness - a term you might also recognize when it's incorrectly deemed to be "sugar-coated" by folks more responsive to Oscar bait drivel hellbent on smearing protagonists' faces in the dirt (allegedly justified because it's set in harsh times) or worse, romanticizing characters' selfless deeds and depicting them with badass overemphasis and nauseating contrast. To the boon of discerning audiences everywhere, however, Kit Kittredge has elected to follow the former path.

As a tale of weathering hardship during the Depression, Kit Kittredge finds additional mileage by its kidpic status when it relates the literal, can-do mindset of its child protagonist to the self-respect lost and regained by depressed workers in the face of obstacles and rejection. Though perhaps clunkily integrated into the story, Kit manages to solve a mystery at the same time, in this case a string of repeated thefts, the blame for which was mistakenly approbated on hobos by the prolies, which suggests the social inequality that exacerbated tensions at the time. When Kit's mother opts to rent rooms in their house to boarders to make ends meet, her choice is not bluntly signaled by crude drama but rather played out with unheralded nobility, even though it is ultimately an example of personal sacrifice squandered.

In its leisurely pacing Kit Kittredge finds opportunities to display the tribulations of the Great Depression with exceptional wisdom and understanding, but in terms of classical structure the narrative feels sluggish. Kit is packed tight into one hundred minutes with a few too many characters (the film features many recognizable faces including Joan Cusack, Stanley Tucci, and the bald guy from Whose Line Is It Anyways? though few become three-dimensional) and subplots (some sections are glanced over, like Max Theriot's surrogate daughter learning to read), crowding out time better spent in other areas. The film's mystery is solved in one swift stint before audiences have time to ponder it (though they'll likely be able to reconstruct the scenario shortly before it's explained), while the plot remains slightly monotonous absent a mystical element, often literalized (though by no means less lyrical were it to be figurative) by more successful genre endeavors like Holes, Nancy Drew, and Aquamarine. Nevertheless, Kit Kittredge periodically finds equally candid and appropriately sentimental drama, best represented when a boarder's son fakes a letter from his father (whose return is uncertain) in order to soothe his mother, indicative not only of the personal shame and inadequacy suffered by patriarchs unable to provide for their household and "beat the system" by prospering amidst national problems irreconcilable on an individual level but also that familial cohesion, like physical hunger or occupational fulfillment, is a matter of necessity.