'An American Girl' is an American story -- a timely one
Posted
Jul 07 2008, 03:34 AM
by
Donna Freedman
It can take years for a big Hollywood movie to get approved, let alone filmed. That's why I think that the parallels between "Kit Kittredge: An American Girl" and our current economic situation are probably coincidental.
Foreclosures. Job loss. Hungry people lining up for food handouts. Families who can't make ends meet no matter how hard they work. But enough about today; let's talk about the Great Depression, the setting for "Kit Kittredge."
The film is based on a doll and a series of books (first published in 2000) about a 10-year-old Cincinnati girl during the Depression. I've read a couple of the Kit books and they're well-written; in particular I appreciate their historical afterwords about the real people of that era.
In that spirit, the movie's Web site includes Depression-era recipes, craft ideas, ways for today's kids can "lend a hand" to those in need, and tips on how they can reuse things the way people did in the past instead of discarding things so easily.
Many children could benefit from messages like these. So could plenty of grownups.
What poverty looks like
Given the G-rated film's intended audience, the moviemakers couldn't get too specific about the social impacts of widespread poverty. But it does mention fathers who left home to look for work and never came back. It notes that people hopped trains in search of greener pastures. It shows those people starving in a hobo jungle.
The titular heroine (Abigail Breslin, of "Little Miss Sunshine") is shocked when the next-door neighbors lose their home. She's humiliated when she sees her father, who's lost his livelihood, eating in a soup kitchen. And she's aghast when the family must take in boarders and raise chickens to survive.
Is Kit deprived? She thinks she is. Eventually she learns to be thankful for what she has, musing that "we're all a few strokes of bad luck away" from being ruined.
Onscreen that's not as ham-handed as it sounds. The character is allowed to grow slowly, changing from a fairly privileged girl who believes that egg-selling is the last desperate measure before "the poorhouse" into a kid who cheerfully delivers those cackleberries on her orange-crate scooter. She helps her mother with endless chores, learns to wear a feed-sack dress with dignity, and never gives up on her dream of being a newspaper reporter someday.
Warts and all
"An American Girl" isn't perfect. It's notably naïve in its approach to race relations. Would upper-middle-class whites in Depression-era Cincinnati really accept an African-American child so lovingly, especially an African-American hobo child? America was openly segregated back then, and this is the same bunch of folks who want to run all "vagrants" out of town.
I also agree with reviewers who say that the subplot about a "hobo crime wave" is gratuitous. Why couldn't the movie have simply been about a difficult time in history and how people survived it?
Those concerns aside, the film may help introduce the idea that money isn't everything. The Web site activities could encourage volunteerism and -- who knows? -- a less materialistic attitude as kids try making "tommywalkers" out of tin cans or cooking up a batch of macaroni and cheese from scratch.
Before you know it, your kid might ask for canned goods for the food bank in lieu of presents at her next birthday party.
How poverty is perceived
What was most interesting to me is the attitude of many of the film's characters toward the suddenly less fortunate. Many of the adults and even some of the children speak disparagingly of the unemployed either as lazy bums trying to get something out of the government or as shiftless and untrustworthy pikers who should be starved, not fed, so that they'll go away.
All, of course, speak from comfortable positions. Their homes haven't been taken away. Their shoes fit. They know their next meals are secure.
It's the same attitude I've been hearing more often lately: Poor people are lazy. If they just worked a little harder, they wouldn't be poor.
The people who say this don't want to hear about how people wind up poor. That would mean adjusting the worldview that keeps them comfortable and (in their minds) safe. Specifically, it means acknowledging that being poor could happen to anyone.
Think you're invulnerable? Think again. These days, I don't think anyone is bulletproof. Better hang on to that mac and cheese recipe, just in case.
