Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children: A Few Thoughts on the Book and the Film
This is a very odd little book.
It follows Jake as he uncovers the truth behind his grandfather’s tall tales and old photographs of peculiar children. The first half is a slow, eerie mystery and the second where he actually learns the truth is an adventure. These two halves feel very much bolted together, never quite cohering as its thematic ideas and characters meander.
But that’s really not why I couldn’t put the book down.
There’s this wonderful sense of unease and unreality to the fact that it is a narrative contrived around a series of actual old photographs[1]. There’s something about the idea of this story existing half in our world. But the seams show completely as the story is often just yanking the protagonist from cache to cache of old pictures so that he can share them with the reader whilst expositing about them.
There are a lot of things I could nitpick about the book and can do so exhaustively[2]. The worldbuilding is grab-bag at best, but I do think its gimmick of old photos pulls it together to be worth reading, especially as its briskly written and has excellent atmosphere.
And then there’s the film…
Without the thread of the photos holding the narrative structure together, the whole film feels even more of a mess than it was already. The trailers (as well as the first few minutes) already gave away the bulk of the revelations so there simply isn’t any reason to play out the lengthly mystery section of Jake’s investigation. Instead of being this slow build of investigation and mystery, it becomes a tortuously long prologue.
The casting of Samuel L. Jackson as the villain in a film of lily white protagonists makes for problematic visuals. One can very uncharitably summarise the movie as a group of white people hiding from the world and trying to keep a scary black guy from their perfect version of 1943[3].
The movie has been described as Tim Burton’s X-Men and people have hence taken further umbrage at the lack of diversity in the cast, but really it shares few thematic threads with X-Men. These aren’t mutants who are hiding from humans who fear them because they are different. Despite a few lines that gesture vaguely at that direction, the antagonists aren’t there because of humanity’s inability to cope with peculiarity. There’s a thread about time and perfection, eternal youth and growing old, immortality and the price of it, but it’s all very garbled and underexplored. It sort of goes a little Hoffman’s Sandman, which I always appreciate, but it just doesn’t fit together.
Furthermore, only the older children get meaningful plot arcs (You must be this old to get character development!) and a lot of it uses romance as a shorthand for them coming to their own. Which I don’t object to, per se, but it’s just all so awkward. That said, the peculiarities are genuinely a joy to watch play out and they are visually fresh compared to another iteration of the X Men’s core cast. The girls get some excellent “front line” powers, which pleases me greatly.
This is all to say that the film is a mess, a series of arresting images. The characters play out poorly but there is so much potential in the margins. Much like many other Tim Burton movies that are ridiculous messes but sort of worth it for those few iconic moments that stick around in one’s mind.
All in all, it’s a mess I find endlessly fascinating. I’m still trying to pull apart the strands of the movie and I suspect will continue to do so for ages.
And, like, a little girl rips a wooden unicorn from a merry go round and hurls it at a monster. I am incredibly easy to pander to.
[1] The author is a collector of vintage trick photography.
[2] I have very mixed feelings about whether or not I like the fact that it all just turns out to be literally true. There’s something quite powerful about the idea of the monsters being a metaphor for the Nazis and then it sort of all falls apart because they’re not even RedSkull-esque in being double Nazis. The whole 40s WW2 thing just becomes irrelevant. I mean, Jake is heavily implied to be Jewish and from Poland but that’s yet another dropped plot point…. I can keep going.
[3] Paraphrased from: Tim Burton’s Peculiar Whiteness. Not entirely an accurate summary and I have complicated feelings about audiences and material. Little villages in Wales are not known for their diverse populations, etc, but the point is that one don’t want to even entertain the possibility of one’s movie look quite that racist at a glance.
