10/24/97
MOVIE REVIEW: Fairy Tale: A True Story
'Fairy Tale': True story of the power of hope

By MICHAEL JANUSONIS
Journal-Bulletin Arts Writer

*** (out of five)
Starring Florence Hoath, Elizabeth Earl, Paul McGann, Phoebe Nicholls, Peter O'Toole, Harvey Keitel. A Paramount picture written by Ernie Contreras, directed by Charles Sturridge. Rated PG, contains nothing offensive. Running time: 98 minutes.

If you believe in fairies, clap your hands and float over to see Fairy Tale: A True Story.

It's a charming, rich-looking, very pretty piffle of a movie that takes a true story filled with such larger-than-life characters as magician Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes tales and The Lost World, and then Hollywoodizes it with an overlay of fantasy.

I'm not sure who the audience for this film is, except perhaps middle-aged people who still believe in fairies and Peter Rabbit. The fidgety children in the audience I saw it with were expecting Men in Black and instead found a painstakingly detailed look at what happens when people allow their dreams to rule their heads. The children seemed to like the sprites whenever they made a rare appearance, but the fairy world is not the central focus of the film.

Yes, much of Fairy Tale is a true story that follows fairly closely the adventures of a pair of girls in World War I-era Yorkshire whose photographs of cut-out drawings of fairies had many people -- including Doyle -- swearing they were real. Doyle, who had lost a son in World War I and hungered for contact from the Other Side, even wrote an influential magazine article praising the girls for their fairy detective work.

He was gently rebuked by Houdini, who spent a lot of his time offstage exposing spiritualist charlatans who claimed they could commune with the dead, a booming business during wartime.

The girls' photos were so good that there was debate about their authenticity for decades. Accidentally, they had given people what they wanted to hear in a time of trouble -- that fairies and spirits really existed and that there was hope. It was only shortly before they died, some 60-odd years later, that they confessed the whole thing to be a playful hoax that had gotten out of hand.

There were no fairies.

But you wouldn't know that from watching this movie, which presents us with a real fairy world through lushly wonderful special effects. So Fairy Tale is a true story about exposing hokum that then goes out and creates its own hokum . . . and underlines it!

Making make believe

Maybe the filmmakers felt they had to do something to perk up what would otherwise be sort of like an episode of Leave It to Beaver where the Beav makes up some fantastic story and then finds himself deeper and deeper in trouble as people begin to believe the tall tale.

Yet although the filmmakers present us with a fairy world and even let the two little girls react with the fairies in some charming and very clever scenes, there isn't a lot of depth. The fairies don't do anything except flit around gaily, including a remarkable mermaid fairy with a fish tail. They don't speak, although in one amusing sequence they're seen moving out to greener pastures after word gets out about them and dozens of human fairy hunters come prowling for them.

Director Charles Sturridge recently won praise for his fantasy Gulliver's Travels on television, and he brings the same kind of careful detail and gentle fantasy to this film. Sequences are composed so beautifully that it's like looking through an old photo album. Fairy Tale proves how a mix of naivete and simply wanting desperately to believe can make something real.

Certainly that's what happens when little Frances Griffiths (Elizabeth Earl) concocts a plan to photograph fairy cut-outs to bring her Aunt Polly (Phoebe Nicholls) out of her depression over the loss of her son to pneumonia.

Has some magic

With her cousin Elsie Wright (Florence Hoath), Frances sets off with a primitive box camera into the garden. Soon the innocent pictures the girls take there are not only the talk of their household, but the talk of England that spurs a debate between such heavyweights as Doyle (Peter O'Toole) and Houdini (Harvey Keitel).

We never actually see the girls taking the fake photos, although the hoax is alluded to. Rather, Frances, whose father is missing in France and who has her own reasons for wanting to create a make-believe world that's better than the one she's in, actually sees fairies. These sequences give the film its magic.

Earl and Hoath are low-key and very genuine players, adding a sense of awe and wonder to this low-key film which presents their dilemma at being found out in a trap that they've set for themselves. Keitel is surprisingly gentle and warm as Houdini and O'Toole plays Doyle as a genial airhead.

Most of the adults, in fact, save for Houdini and Elsie's father (Paul McGann), seem more naive than the children, who sometimes do all that they can to keep from bursting out in laughter.