Producers: Pippa Harris, Nicholas Brown, Danny Perkins and Jane Hooks   Director: Ben Gregor   Screenplay: Simon Farnaby   Cast: Andrew Garfield, Claire Foy, Billie Gadsdon, Delilah Bennett-Cardy, Phoenix Laroche, Nicola Coughlan, Nonso Anozie, Dustin Demri-Burns, Jessica Gunning, Oliver Chris, Hiran Abeysekera, Rebecca Ferguson, Jennifer Saunders, Mark Heap, Simon Farnaby, Claire Keelan, Lenny Henry, Michael Palin, Simon Russell Beale, Ramon Tikaram, Pippa Bennett-Warner, Jos Vantyler  and Judi Dench   Distributor: Vertical

Grade: C

The makers of this family film have gone to great lengths to turn the “Faraway Tree” books by Enid Blyton (four of them were published from 1939 to 1951, with the second, of 1943, providing the movie’s title) into a “Wizard of Oz”-type screen classic.  They hired a writer accomplished in such fare (Simon Farnaby, who co-wrote both “Paddington 2” and “Wonka”) and assembled a starry cast headed by Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy, with a host of popular British actors and comedians to support them and, in cameos, such luminaries as Michael Palin, Simon Russell Beale and Judi Dench. 

The problem with the result isn’t that its aspirations aren’t high; it’s that it tries much too hard to achieve them.  “The Magic Faraway Tree” is so hectically directed by Ben Gregor and edited by Gary Dollner that it comes across as desperate, so overstuffed with characters that they go by in a blur, so revved-up that the performances are cartoonish, and so intent on providing a moral for today’s children that it loses any charm the books possess as period pieces.

What’s positive about “The Magic Faraway Tree” are the extravagant visuals.  You have to admire Alexandra Walker’s production design, Ann Maskrey’s costumes, Alison Harvey’s set decoration, and widescreen cinematography by Zac Nicholson that gives everything a lustrous glow.  But they don’t make up for the cumbersome narrative, while the irksomely peppy score by Isabella Summers is another debit.

Farnaby made his first mistake in updating the story to the present.  Polly (Foy) and Tim (Garfield) Thomson are living in London with their three children, older daughter Beth (Delilah Bennett-Cardy), her sister Fran (Billie Gadsdon) and their brother Joe (Phoenix Laroche).  They’re very different—Beth is stern and demanding, bespectacled Fran reserved and quiet, even mute, and Joe dour—but they’re all devoted to their electronic devices.  That upsets Polly and Tim.

Polly supports the family in her job as an inventor/engineer for a large corporation, but she quits when the company adds a secret spy camera to her glitzy new refrigerator (voiced by Dench).  Tim, a stay-at-home dad, suggests this might be the perfect time to reach for his dream of returning to the countryside of his youth, where he can make his special spaghetti sauce from tomatoes he grows himself and market it. 

Despite the kids’ objections, they rent a dilapidated barn of a house from farmer-landlords Simon and Beryl (Farnaby and Claire Keelan) even though the lack of WiFi sends the children into paroxysms; Tim and Polly are certain it will do the kids good to give up their devices, read books, help with the farming and enjoy the outdoors, feeling the magic of the place Tim knew as a child.

It’s Fran who makes contact with the last, being contacted by the fairy Silky (Nicola Coughlan), who invites her to the tree where she lives with boastful Moonface (Nonso Anozie), rattling Saucepan Man (Dustin Demri-Burns), workaholic Dame Washalot (Jessica Gunning), forgetful Mr. Watzisname (Oliver Chris) and the Angry Pixie (Hiran Abeysekera).  To gain entrance she must intone “I believe in magic” three times-an obvious crib from the “I believe in fairies” bit from “Peter Pan” (Blyton was, at least, astute in her choice of models).

They introduce her to the ladder that goes to a revolving series of lands in the clouds above.  First up is the Land of Goodies, i.e. candies, where the only rule is not to be greedy.  The previously mute but now talkative Fran takes her siblings to the tree, and they go to the Land of Birthdays, where a permanent party centers on skating and wishes are automatically granted.

Unfortunately, Joe, Silky, Saucepan and Fran make unwise choices that cannot be reversed, so they go to the loud, duplicitous Mr. Oom Boom Boom (Mark Heap), with whom Silky makes a deal to free the others from their wishes.  They wind up in Backwards Land, where most of the spells are reversed, while Boom Boom’s plan to send Silky to the realm of the nasty teacher Dame Snap (Rebecca Ferguson) is foiled.  But Beth neglects to reverse her wish for Tim’s business to fail.

Meanwhile Tim and Polly’s work on the farm is interrupted by Polly’s rich, imperious mother (Jennifer Saunders), whom unhappy Beth had contacted for help.  By this time, her attitude, along with those of Fran and Joe, has changed, and they all pitch in to help with the tomatoes.  On the day of his grand opening, however, Beth’s wish takes its toll, so the children make their way back to the tree to climb to the Land of Know-It-Alls where the multi-headed fellow (Palin, Beale and Lenny Henry) reveals they can travel to the Land of Spells and reverse the blight on the crop via an aging plane.  There a merchant (Ramon Tikaram) accommodates them in return for their singing a “family song.”

Unfortunately, the plane runs out of fuel on the way home and deposits them all in the realm of Dame Snap, where they are forced into detention for their misbehavior—among the offenses is farting in the classroom.  The revelation that the kids’ father is Tim, who visited the tree when a child and hasn’t forgotten his friends, leads Moonface to come up with an escape plan.  The spell is reversed at the last minute, and the grand opening is a roaring success.

One can understand why Blyton’s books, with their message about the joys of the countryside, would have had an impact during World War II, when many English children were being sent from the cities into rural areas for safety’s sake.  The morals taught in them—don’t be greedy, be careful what you wish for, appreciate your family—at a time of shortages and dislocation would also have been welcome.  Relocated to the present, all of this becomes much more generic and bland.  Adding a warning about children’s addiction to electronic devices is no substitute, especially since it’s become a cliché (see “Toy Story 5,” though the cure there was toys rather than magic). 

But still the film might have been pleasant enough if the approach wasn’t so forced and heavy. That’s especially true in the acting, which is conspicuously broad and italicized.  Secondary performers like Ferguson, Heap, Farnaby, Abeysekera and Saunders are among the worst offenders, but though Foy is admirably restrained, Garfield is very badly used; poor Tim is required to yell “Ooh-Hoo!” way too often, as well as dance about and accompany his cooking with reams of dialogue in an exaggerated Italian accent.  When he’s allowed to calm down, Garfield is fine; he’s just not permitted to do so often enough.

“Faraway Tree” has its heart in the right place and is undoubtedly eye-catching; undemanding family audiences might find it agreeable enough.  But the over-the-top approach chosen by Farnaby and Gregor leaves it seriously deficient in cinematic magic and simple charm.                               

Producers: Sidney Kimmell, Matt Aragachi, Christopher Hammond, Tyler Zacharia, John Logan Pierson and Michael Russell Gunn   Director: Michael Russell Gunn   Screenplay: Michael Russell Gunn   Cast: Jeff Daniels, Jared Harris, J.K. Simmons, Hope Davis, Branka Katić, Aya Cash, Guy Burnet, John Ross Bowie, Adrian Rawlins, Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson, Vladimir Kulich, Stephen Brennan and Catherine Burdon   Distributor: Angel Studios

Grade: C

The thesis of Michael Russell Gunn’s film is that the two-day Reykjavík Summit of October 1986 between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and U.S.S.R. General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, seen at the time as a failure, was actually a critical moment in the Cold War—the point when the two nations finally stepped back from the policy of nuclear brinkmanship that had prevailed since the 1950s based on the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, leading to agreements that saw the countries reducing their nuclear arsenals, and ultimately to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But Gunn goes further, accepting the idea advanced by some that it was Reagan’s policy of putting economic pressure on the U.S.S.R. that forced Gorbachev to the table and ultimately destroyed what he called an evil empire based on a communist system that was the enemy of human freedom, which he held as a sacred good.

There’s some validity to this idea, but it’s not really compatible with the reality that the 1986 summit floundered, despite extraordinary progress made in outlining the possibility of arms reduction, over Reagan’s intransigence about his pet project, the Strategic Defense Initiative, an elaborate, space-based system to protect against incoming ballistic missiles that was eventually determined to be impractical and scrapped, though elements of it survived in more modern form (even if, as Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite” recently argued, the result is hardly foolproof).  It also waves aside the intricacy of twentieth century history and the contributions of others—not least Gorbachev, who’s here painted as someone Reagan plays brilliantly, in the unravelling of the Soviet system, which had been in decline for decades.

But the script nonetheless paints the meeting as a triumph for Reagan because it secured a victory on the issue of human rights: a visa for a visit to the U.S. for the sister of cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who had defected in 1974.  All it took was a small concession—the president’s promise not to allow her to defect during the U.S. stay.  And that proved a modest crack in the wall of Soviet mistrust and intransigency that inexorably expanded, resulting in the liberation of the Soviet satellite states and the collapse of the U.S.S.R.    

The problem is that in casting the fall of communism as a Reagan accomplishment, Gunn has oversimplified the complexity of a long historical process in a film that’s basically just one more chapter of Thomas Carlyle’s Great Man theory of history, reductive in the extreme.

If one sets that aside (something that’s admittedly difficult to do), how does “The Brink of War” measure up as drama?  Well, even the title raises questions.  The U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had definitely been on the brink of nuclear war in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but by 1986 they had gradually fallen into a relationship of muted animosity that, despite the continued Soviet presence in Afghanistan and other localized disputes, hardly put them at the point of launching missiles at each other.  They just had amassed too many missiles with nuclear warheads, and as “Dr. Strangelove” had hilariously warned, accidents could happen. The 1986 summit did open the door to mitigating, if not solving, that sobering fact.

And with his access to transcripts of the Reagan-Gorbachev meetings and other documentary evidence, Gunn has fashioned a credible paraphrase of the arguments the two sides made.  The sessions in a small room—the actual site of the 1986 meeting at Höfði outside Reykjavik (which doesn’t give production designer Gunnar Palsson much to do), are necessarily claustrophobic to a degree, but Gunn, cinematographer Magdalena Gorka and editors Mike Sale and Laura Yanovich choose the shots with sufficient variety to avoid tedium.

They’re given some verve, too, by the performances of Jeff Daniels and Jared Harris.  In truth Daniels doesn’t look, or sound, much like Reagan, but he has mastered some mannerisms—his characteristic gait and tilt of the head, usually with a “Well”—that are spot on.  Harris brings a hint of stiffness to Gorbachev that’s quite effective.  But it must be admitted that Gunn has fashioned their back-and-forths to favor Reagan, so Daniels has the greater opportunity to shine. Even Austin Wintory’s score swoons when he’s on screen.

It’s when the action moves outside the conference room that problems arise, both of speculation and melodramatics.  The episodes featuring Secretary of State George Shultz, played in reliably no-nonsense fashion by J.K. Simmons as another sort American hero, the establishment fellow who’s come to admire Reagan for his sense of principle but is nonetheless willing to prod him with a good suggestion when an opening occurs (here, at least, he’s the one who contrives the Rostropovich compromise), are fine if rather obvious. 

But elsewhere things plummet. Reagan’s brief exchanges with his other advisors—Ken Adelman (John Ross Bowie), Max Kampelman (Adrian Rawlins), Richard Perle (Jóhannes Haukur Jóhannesson) and Paul Nitze (Stephen Brennan)—are mostly used to show his jovial side, and his phone calls with Nancy (Hope Davis), who chose to stay in Washington, are too cute for comfort.  Even worse are the intimate moments between Gorbachev and his wife Raisa (Branka Katić), who’s come along with her husband and is determined to show off her wardrobe in outdoor excursions with the international press.   That leads to some truly excruciating scenes with a couple of obnoxious reporters, Cleo (Aya Cash) of NPR and Alexander (Guy Burnet) of The Times.  Almost as bad is the digression about how Nancy Reagan, upset that Raisa is stealing the spotlight, upstages her rival long-distance with an announcement of an initiative on breast cancer.

But even those scenes pale beside those set in the basement, where operatives from the CIA and the KGB are awkwardly thrown together.  As the chiefs of the two groups watch bemusedly, their people toss verbal insults at one another more on-the-nose that those Reagan and Gorbachev deliver in their most animated moments.  Even here, though, Gunn can’t close the sidebar out without a note of détente.      

In the final analysis, “The Break of War” is about on the level of those TV movies and mini-series that networks once made about World War II figures like Churchill, Roosevelt, Mussolini and Stalin.  It’s not bad, and may serve a useful educational function when knowledge of American history has become so limited; teachers will probably find it a useful tool to plug up gaps in their class schedules.

But its determination to punch up Reagan’s reputation at a time when it’s depreciated even in the party that once venerated him throws its accuracy and balance into question.