Harriet the Spy

Harriet the Spy is a clever movie that mixes a Sixties pop spy tempo and decidedly retro film speed manipulation with updated cultural and ideological icons and an aggressively Nineties soundtrack by Jamshied Sharif. It's an interesting, but ultimately disappointing, approach. The very cleverness of the movie, with its odd camera angles and stylized, fast-motion sequences, is distracting -- extravagant dressing on a window with an already interesting view. The essential story, based on Louise Fitzhugh's 1964 children's classic, is still dear and engaging. Twelve-year-old Harriet was born with a vocation. She will be a writer. And her mentor and nanny of those 12 years advises her that to become a writer she must record everything that interests her. Harriet develops a spy route, watching, often surreptitiously, everyone around her and recording her findings in a "private" journal. But Harriet's observations are subjectively candid and include sometimes funny, often uncomplimentary portraits of her classmates, including her best friends, Sport and Janie. When the book falls into the hands of her archenemy and its contents read aloud to her classmates, Harriet is ostracized and tormented. Even Sport and Janie, wounded by Harriet's words, defect. In desperate retaliation, Harriet compounds her errors, using her considerable creativity to up the ante. But rather than a sense of satisfaction or triumph, Harriet feels an ache akin to "having a splinter in your finger, except it's right over your stomach." It is a lesson that, like nearly every painful, discomfiting aspect of growing up, is timeless. It's about friends and unkindness and making amends. It's about privacy and perception and human differences. It's a simple lesson that doesn't require a lot of pyrotechnics in the telling. The cast is terrific. Watching Michelle Trachtenberg's pale, thin, quivering, intense performance, we are transported to the sixth grade. And the colorful neighbors are a time warp unto themselves with little need of contemporizing. Why mess with gratuitous camera movement when the lens could be focused on Eartha Kitt's cotton-candy pink hair? Nickolodeon was a partner in this production and you have to wonder if they felt compelled to liven things up for the younger crowd or to make their first big screen venture more "cinematic." To me, all that frenetic action is like a series of overly long drum solos in the middle of an otherwise singable song.