COMMENTARY : Little Lost ‘Princess’ : This Is a Wonderful Film. So Where’s the Audience?

What do you do when you’ve made one of the most magically felt family films ever made in this country--the kind of movie parents are supposedly clamoring for--and the families can’t be convinced to come?

This must be the question that Warner Bros. and the people who made “A Little Princess” are asking themselves right now. They’ve done everything right: This adaptation of the Frances Hodgson Burnett classic about Sara Crewe, the 10-year-old “princess” who grew up in India and who changes the lives of everyone around her at Miss Minchin’s School for Girls in New York, has the emotional depth and storybook splendor to stay with audiences forever--and not just young audiences, either. Like “The Red Balloon” or “The Black Stallion” or “E.T.,” it’s the kind of film that could turn kids into movie lovers for life. (If only there were enough movies in their future to replenish that love!)

But if the commercial response to a film like “A Little Princess” is this tepid, what chance is there that other gifted filmmakers will be encouraged, not to mention financed, to also do it right? (“A Little Princess,” which opened May 10, has to date grossed around $5.4 million. By comparison, “Casper” in its first weekend grossed $22 million.)

Certainly the critical response has been everything the filmmakers could have hoped for. It’s probably the best reviewed movie of the year. Still, a film about little darlings in a Victorian Gothic girls’ boarding school in 1914 is a tough sell these days at the multiplex.

It wasn’t always this way. If this film had been released in Hollywood in, say, the 1930s (when the Shirley Temple version of this material was made) or even as recently as the ‘70s, it would have been cherished unapologetically by audiences. But today apologies apparently are in order. Much more so than ever before, the “family film” carries an air of disparagement.

It’s become a ghettoized genre: G-rated pap for pokey preteens. Parents don’t expect anything from these movies except a headache. The whole idea of a family in a theater experiencing together a movie that unifies their imaginations, and their love for movies, has degraded. We are now living in a time when family entertainment, in the form of interactive computer games and videos, has become a compartmentalized, isolating experience. It is the home, and not the theater, that has become the family’s total entertainment center.

A film like “A Little Princess” doesn’t fit into the turbocharged, Dolby-ized atmosphere of today’s movie world. Which is not to say that it is without special favors. But, unlike most movies nowadays, it doesn’t try to do everything for us except park our car. It doesn’t try to rattle our bones or turn itself into a theme park or a toy store or a computer game. Have we lost faith in the sheer, radiant, ungizmo-ed simplicity of the film-going experience?

The people who made “A Little Princess”--the honor roll includes director Alfonso Cuaron, screenwriters Richard LaGravenese and Elizabeth Chandler, producer Mark Johnson, production designer Bo Welch, cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, composer Patrick Doyle and editor Steven Weisberg--draw us into a state of heightened, imaginative complicity, as if we were dreaming right along with Sara in this girls’ world.

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The film has fantasy sequences set in a dream-book India that have a ravishing, antique prettiness, with blues and reds and yellows that seem freshly mined, and compositions that, in their sophisticated primitivism, look like leaves from Kipling’s “Jungle Book” re-imagined by French painter Henri Rousseau.

In a sense, the film’s entire world is fantastical--that’s the core of its meaning. The filmmakers want us to perceive the fundament of magic in the everyday, and how that magic can sustain one’s spirit. The motherless Sara’s world away from India is as densely packed as the mythic landscape of Prince Rama and Princess Sita with which she captivates her school friends. The myth parallels her own separation from her father, who placed her for safekeeping in the school and is later presumed dead fighting in World War I.

The monster who abducts the princess has her counterpart in Eleanor Bron’s Miss Minchin, a Dickensian scourge who casts Sara into the attic, making her a servant girl when she can no longer afford to be a student. Miss Minchin seems to bundle up the darkness about her. She’s an emanation of the school’s dank, deep green chambers. And the little girls who ultimately vanquish her are spunky, entranced cherubim; the big-bow knots in their hair always seem ready to fly apart from the force of their fantasias.

The Hollywood marketing juggernaut may have rolled right over “A Little Princess,” which has no merchandising hook and no big stars in its cast (although, with any justice, Liesel Matthews, who plays Sara, should be a star).

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Kids bombarded by “Casper” trailers and “Casper” toy tie-ins naturally want to see “Casper.” Never mind that it’s a cheesy, half-witted escapade. Kids want to be part of the pack, and so, perhaps, do the parents who take them. We all want to be winners now, piling into the top-grossing movies in order to be part of the action. And the media wants to be on top, too; when a film like “A Little Princess” doesn’t immediately rack up the numbers, coverage dries up fast. So do available movie screens; exhibitors and distributors can’t be bothered trying to build an audience for the film. No one wants to look uncool touting a “loser,” especially one that’s about little girls. Let the movie fend for itself in its video re-release.

If the juggernaut has rolled over “A Little Princess” it’s only because audiences have lost the spirit of resistance. Hollywood can be indicted for many crimes but the indictment here is with people who claim to hunger for heartfelt, inspiring, nonviolent family fare and then, with “A Little Princess” around, line up for “Casper” and clobberfests like “Die Hard With a Vengeance” instead. Maybe a fall/winter release would have helped the film’s chances but, if a movie of this quality can’t find an audience in the late spring/summer, that’s indictment enough.

“A Little Princess” is still around, though. Flattened by the juggernaut, it is yet possible, at least for a while longer, to pick yourself up off the Tarmac and enter into a resplendent realm. The magic of movies is still, fitfully, alive.

The question now is: Is the audience for it dead?