Disney’s new family fairy tale, “The Odd Life of Timothy Green,” invites critical derision, and Mom always taught me it was rude to refuse an invitation.
Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton play bewildered parents who tell their completely insane-sounding life story to a surly adoption agent (Shohreh Aghdashloo) they hope will provide them with a child. It seems that one night, after giving up on their fertility, they opened a bottle of wine and uncorked their dreams. They thought up the kind of kid they’d like to have, wrote each trait on a slip of paper, put them in a box and buried it in the garden.
“He scores the winning goal in the championship game!” is one such wish. Not “Founds the next Facebook”? These are simple people, I guess. They maintain a sort of puppyish blankness on their faces, and when they’re excited, they hop up and down and waggle their hands, like cheerleaders with moderate to severe lead poisoning.
Anyway, that box they planted? It grows into a little boy. “Timothy.” He (as played by CJ Adams) is 10, as beat-up-able as Haley Joel Osment’s robo-boy in “A.I.,” and he has real leaves, which cannot be cut, growing out of his ankles.
The parents claim the kid’s adopted, cover his ankles and send him to school. Director Peter Hedges, who seems to think it’s 1962, cues up a message of “Everyone is different, so let’s be tolerant.” A better film would have been a comedy about the ways 2012 parents would leverage the situation — more test time for their special-needs Botanical-American, “Miracle in the Tomato Patch” book deal and miniseries on House & Garden TV.
The setup is attractively fanciful, and the climax (which includes a witty resolution of the winning-goal prophecy) has heart, though both are supercharged with sucrose. Yet nothing pushes the story forward except bad parenting. Mom and Dad steer Timothy into playing soccer, at which he is terrible, even though he has a gift for art. They allow him to attend a pool party without ascertaining whether he can swim. When he makes friends with a girl (Odeya Rush), they try to shoo her away. They give him the kind of dorky yellow socks that no bully can (or, frankly, should) resist using as an excuse for a beatdown.
The middle is a sustained onslaught of cuteness, but cuteness should be light, like the scene where an uncle (M. Emmet Walsh) says, in a crazily belligerent tone, “Did you know I invented the peanut butter and jelly sandwich?” and the boy says, “Did you know I’m a big fan of your work”? What cuteness should not be is as insistent as a Jehovah’s Witness on your doorstep in the rain.
Hedges (who made the similarly toned “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?”) takes the quaintness to an almost otherworldly level in his small town of milk drinkers, where no one ever gets distracted by an iPhone and the meanest person in sight is Ron Livingston (as the factory boss). Somewhere, Norman Rockwell is groaning, “Too corny.”
Still, I couldn’t quite hate the movie. It made me think, with more fondness than regret, of the magic boy in John Irving’s “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (previously manhandled on screen as “Simon Birch”). Timothy Green asks, “Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road? No guts.” If the movie’s story is anything but daring, it does takes guts to make a movie so shamelessly emotional as this one. Not that guts are the same as taste.