Abigail Breslin, center, as Kit Kittredge, with Madison Davenport, left, and Brieanne Jansen, right, as her classmates in Kit Kittredge: An American Girl.

picturehouse / Cylla von Tiedemann

Although it’s set in 1934 at the height of the Great Depression, there’s something remarkably up-to-date about Kit Kittredge: An American Girl. It’s based on one of the dolls and books in a popular series that’s geared to girls 3 to 12, mixing historical fact and inspirational fiction.

House foreclosures. Soup kitchens. People thrown out of work. Business failings. The basics in the Kit Kittredge script seem ripped from today’s sad headlines.

At the center is a plucky 10-year-old girl who wears her heart on her sleeve. Kit Kittredge has never been able to say no to some unfortunate, whether it’s a sad-eyed Bassett hound named Grace, who sits forlornly on a Cincinnati sidewalk, or a pair of young hobos, who are willing to work for food. No matter what crisis lands next on the Kittredge household, somehow young Kit will pull them through it.

She’s a Shirley Temple character. Maybe if I were a 10-year-old female I would fall in love with her and cheer her on. But I’m not and I didn’t.

Actually, I’m not some grumpy old sourpuss either. I found a lot to like in the fresh-faced naïvete of the title character played by Abigail Breslin, especially upfront. Director Patricia Rozema (Mansfield Park) has painted a very lifelike and sympathetic picture of the people who struggled through the greatest economic upheaval in American history. Yet the script by Ann Peacock, who wrote the first Chronicles of Narnia movie, tries to cram in as much of the heartaches of those years as possible, along with a raft full of colorful characters that sometimes overwhelms the fragile story.

Consider that shortly into Kit Kittredge, the neighbors have lost their house, Kit brings home Grace the dog as well as the two little hobos, her father loses his car dealership and Kit discovers him taking a handout at a soup kitchen. Soon after he departs for Chicago in search of work. Trying to hold things together, her mother turns their home into a boarding house and Kit is pushed out of her bedroom to accommodate boarders. Whew!

But the film has a nice kid’s-eye-view of things, what with Kit knuckling under to roll with all the punches tossed her way while trying to become a reporter. She’s attempting to get an article about her adventures at the Chicago World’s Fair published in the local newspaper. That Kit is played with sincerity and grit by Breslin, an Academy Award nominee for Little Miss Sunshine is a plus in helping make the film real. Well, at least it is until the final moments when the script becomes more than a little over-the-top daffy.

But until then there are some nice moments about the day-to-day perils of life in the midst of economic collapse. In the boarders it has a bunch of offbeat colorful characters to play off. There’s a traveling magician (Stanley Tucci) who can levitate hypnotized members of his audience; a dizzy woman (Joan Cusack) who operates a traveling library out of her truck which she can never remember how to stop; a man-chasing dance instructor (Jane Krakowski), a self-righteous mother (Glenne Headly) and her big-eared son (Zach Mills), a down-on-his-luck traveling man (Dylan Smith) who arrives with a trained monkey named Curtis. Trying to stay above it all is Kit’s amazingly calm and saintly mother (Julia Ormond).

Most adults in the audience will probably go along with this homespun if rose-colored view of the not-so-distant past in which every one of the hobos living in the “Hobo Jungle” on the outskirts of the city seem kindly, well-educated, selfless, caring folk. But good will is tested when the script collapses into a silly, incredible sequence in which Kit tries to get to the bottom of a stolen strong box of money and jewels that have been taken from her mother’s room. At this point Kit Kittredge seems like something from some not-very-good, hokey and too-obvious kid’s show on TV.

** 1/2 Kit Kittredge: An American Girl

Starring: Abigail Breslin, Joan Cusack, Madison Davenport, Glenne Headly, Jane Krakowski, Zach Mills, Chris O’Donnell, Julia Ormond, Wallace Shawn, Stanley Tucci, Willow Smith, Max Thieriot.

Rated: G, contains adult themes, comic violence.

mjanuson@projo.com