An average movie

To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this flick but, since it was starring Frances McDormand and since it was available on Netflix, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, it turned out to be some rather obscure feature based on some apparently popular children books written by Ludwig Bemelmans. Anyway, I really struggled to care about the damned thing. I mean, I never really cared about the genre, even when I was a kid, and this one was basically a rather weak mix of ‘Mary Poppins’ with ‘The Aristocats’ or ‘One Hundred and One Dalmatians’. At least, it did display that Frances McDormand can play pretty much anything but, to be honest, her character was barely developed at all. I mean, who was Miss Clavel actually? Where did she come from? What was her feelings and her thoughts? Did she always want to be a nun? Through the whole duration, you might wonder about this woman but, unfortunately, you will learn pretty much nothing about her. Same thing for the twelve girls living at this boarding school, except for Madeline, none of them was developed whatsoever and I would be hard-pressed to give the name of any of them, even though I saw this movie only yesterday. Concerning the rest of the movie, there was barely a plot and, instead, it was succession of episodic adventures involving Madeline, Miss Clavel and the other students but none of these events was really interesting and/or entertaining. Unsurprisingly, a major thing was the owner of the school trying to sell this house which was probably the most generic approach you could think with this material and, obviously, at the end, they didn’t sell the school which was also just so predictable. Anyway, to conclude, even though I have to admit that it was rather harmless, it was also terribly tedious and I don’t think it is really worth a look, even if you need to entertain some young kids. 

5/10