02/13/98
MOVIE REVIEW: The Borrowers
Small touches rescue a lopsided comedy

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

*** (out of five)
Starring John Goodman, Mark Williams, Jim Broadbent, Celia Imrie, Flora Newbigin, Tom Felton. A PolyGram Films release written by Gavin Scott and John Kamps, based on the books by Mary Norton, directed by Peter Hewitt. Rated PG, contains comic violence. Running time: 83 minutes.

The Borrowers, about tiny people who live under the floorboards of a big English house, has been a popular series of books since Mary Norton wrote the first one in 1952. It was even turned into a British TV mini-series in 1993.

After that buildup, I was surprised that the big-screen version left me underwhelmed. It reminded me of Mouse Hunt . . . and I didn't even see Mouse Hunt, just the commercials. And so, lively and slapsticky and sweet-natured as it is, The Borrowers seems like a retread, even if its origins predate Mouse Hunt by a good 40 years.

Like that film, which is about a mouse who's trying to protect its home from a pair of renovators who want to pull it apart, The Borrowers is about a tiny family who try to stop a grasping lawyer from taking over the house they live in and tearing it down to build a luxury apartment complex.

Played by a fuming John Goodman like some overwrought 19th-century stage villain, attorney Ocious P. Potter is a perfect foil for the pratfall traps that tiny Arrietty Clock (Flora Newbigin) and her brother Peagreen (Tom Felton) set up. This includes covering him with melted cheese and trussing him up the way the Lilliputians did to Gulliver.

When the Clock children are accidentally left in the house while the rest of the family is moving across town, Potter tries to get rid of them by hammering through the walls, even calling in an exterminator, just as in Mouse Hunt. He rants and rattles and raves. He's a buffoonish, larger-than-life character. And it's inevitable that he'll be defeated by the teensy Clock kids, with help from normal-size boy Pete Lender (Bradley Pierce), who lives in the house and befriends them.

Yet this fantasy-adventure has its charming conceits, like the Christmas mini-lights that illuminate the Clock living space inside the walls of the house, or the fact that the Borrowers -- who call themselves that because they don't consider taking objects from humans stealing -- are great climbers. They travel around the human-size part of the house like mountaineers, clambering up cabinets and inside the freezer compartment of a refrigerator and coming into close contact with lots of products whose brand names tower over them like billboards. The payment for product placement must have been enormous.

But the only major surprise in this odd production is that, although it was filmed in England, it features mostly American actors, except for those who play the Borrowers themselves, who are British. It gives the film a strange neither-here-nor-there sensibility.

And, true to a film that's aimed at small fry, who will probably enjoy the high jinks, there's even a scene in which a major joke is made of a bloodhound passing gas.