Stars: Freddie Highmore, Mary Louise Parker, Nick Nolte, David Strathairn, Seth Rogan, Martin Short
Directed by: Mark Waters
Reviewed by: Victoria Alexander, Zboneman.com
Grade: B-
This is the most accurate portrayal of an ayahuasca experience for
public consumption dressed up as a children's fairy tale - at least
this is the way I saw it. I should know. I've been going to the
Peruvian Amazon since 2000 to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies. I've
been to other worlds.
I will be speaking at The 4th International Amazonian Shamanism Conference: Magic, Myths & Miracles in Iquitos, Peru. The Conference will be held July 19th - 27th, 2008. The subject of my talk is "Medieval Mysticism and its Empirical Kinship to Ayahuasca." http://www.soga-del-alma.org/ConferenceSite/
While based on the young people's books called "The Spiderwick Chronicles" written by Holly Black and illustrated by Tony DiTerlizzi (though such delineation is not made in the credits. Tony's name comes first in the credits. He must have had a more persuasive agent!), it is very close to the landscape traveled when ingesting entheogens. Take an entheogen and you will see the inhabitants of other worlds. There are monster-guardians (in "The Spiderwick Chronicles" they are called ogres) and fierce characters with their own agendas.
When you enter other worlds, you are the intruder, the ghost, the monster.
In fact, there is a circle of mushrooms protecting the Spiderwick house, though they are not identified as the species in the Psilocybe genus (if I had seen the stems I could have made the appropriate evaluation). To see the other world Jared gets spit in the eyes. (Shamans can transfer power to their initiates through their saliva.)
But this is a dark fantasy for children so I'll leave my own highly personal and no doubt controversial interpretation aside.
Arthur Spiderwick (David Strathairn) has somehow cracked the code, lifted the veil, or jumped into the abyss - he has entered a world of strange creatures who live alongside ours. Like others before him (do you really believe all those Hindu and Egyptian half human/half animal gods and goddesses were made up to control the gullible masses?), Spiderwick records everything he discovered in a pictorial he called "Arthur Spiderwick's Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You." Then he put a warning on the book and hid it away.
Leaving his wife and daughter behind, he is frozen in time and imprisoned by a flock of fairies (his Etheric Double, that is).
Eighty
years later Spiderwick's great-niece Helen Grace (Mary-Louise Parker)
moves into his rundown Victorian mansion. Helen has inherited the house
and, starting life over after separating from her husband, moves in
with her teenage daughter, Mallory (Sarah Bolger), and her twin sons,
Jared and Simon (Freddie Highmore).
It takes unhappy Jared one hour in the house to find Spiderwick's secret room and The Book. Ignoring the warning, he opens it.
There are rules to follow as well as defensive food ploys to kill the monsters who have been trying to get their hands on The Book.
Jared is soon enlisting the help of his sister and shy, gentle twin brother while hating his mother. A tiny creature, Thimbletack (voiced by Martin Short), sort of gives Jared the speed course in what the ogre, Mulgarath (Nick Nolte) plans to do - kill all humans.
All Mulgarath, a shape-shifting monster, needs is The Book to become ruler of the human realm. Unless The Book is taken outside the ring of mushrooms, which protects all that is inside the house, he only controls a squeaking army of creatures. It's up to Jared and his siblings to destroy Mulgarath and make right the world.
With their mother blissfully disconnected from her children, they are off exploring the other world. But what happened to a sit-down, a negotiation, or a treaty?