Because of Winn-Dixiereview by Peter T. Chattaway |
posted 2/18/2005
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Because of Winn-Dixie is quite possibly the best movie yet from Walden Media, the company created by Christian billionaire Philip Anschutz for the express purpose of making film adaptations of acclaimed children's books like Holes and I Am David. And while the world waits with breathless anticipation to see how Walden's upcoming adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe turns out, Because of Winn-Dixie may be their most "Christian" effort to date.
Newcomer AnnaSophia Robb plays Opal, who befriends a stray dog
Based on a Newbery Honor-winning book by Kate DiCamillo, the film concerns a girl who has just moved to a small Florida town with her preacher father, and the stray dog the girl picks up at a Winn-Dixie grocery store—hence the dog's name. The dog is filthy and unkempt, and what's more, he has a knack for throwing things into disarray. But Opal (newcomer AnnaSophia Robb) persuades her father, whom she refers to as "the Preacher" (Jeff Daniels), to take the dog into their trailer.
At first the girl and the mutt are just two lonely individuals who have only each other for companionship, but it isn't long before Winn-Dixie is dragging Opal from one new and unexpected destination to another, inadvertently introducing her to new friends of all ages. First, they visit a pet store manned by a guitar-playing drifter named Otis (Dave Matthews). Otis refuses to deal with Opal and her furry friend at first, but when he asserts that the store's resident parrot hates dogs, the bird proves him wrong by coming to rest on Winn-Dixie's head—so Otis relents.
Images like these make it tempting to think of Winn-Dixie as a Christ figure, not unlike his canine compatriot in My Dog Skip; in an earlier scene, Opal had given Winn-Dixie a thorough washing in an inflatable swimming pool, and the winged creature who sits on his head in the pet store bears a striking resemblance to the dove that appeared immediately after Jesus was baptized. Coincidence? Perhaps—but there are other points in the story, too, that seem to be, at the very least, influenced by the narrative thrust of the Gospels.
Which is not to say that Because of Winn-Dixie is a straightforward allegory; it's more complex than that. Winn-Dixie himself is a wounded soul who, it turns out, is scared of lightning storms. When he wakes up in the middle of the night and starts running back and forth in the trailer, knocking down every object in sight, Opal and her father can only sit and stare; if they let him out of the trailer, he might run out into the storm and become lost again. Sometimes bearing someone else's burden may mean sitting back and letting them trash the place.
More broadly, Winn-Dixie can be seen as a mischievous agent of grace who brings the unpredictable into people's lives yet also helps to bring those people together into a sense of community in which there is neither male nor female, black nor white, young nor old. Annoyed by the other children at church, Opal prefers to become friends with the local grown-ups, and so she hangs out with Miss Franny (Eva Marie Saint), a spinster librarian who clings to the legacy of her Civil War ancestor, and the partially blind Gloria Dump (Cicely Tyson), whose own troubled past helps Opal come to terms with her absent mother. And gradually, through these friendships, Opal is encouraged to see the good in those her own age, too.
So far, so true to the book. But first-time screenwriter Joan Singleton doesn't quite trust the story to work on its own uplifting terms, so she introduces a couple other characters to provide the film with a greater sense of conflict. Thankfully, the subplot involving a surly landlord (B.J. Hopper), who demands that Winn-Dixie be sent to the pound, is resolved in an amusingly satisfying way; but the other subplot, involving a pigheaded police officer (Harland Williams) who harasses Otis for no good reason, goes nowhere. True, it is fun to watch Otis's animals strike back at the cop, but the fact that he is never brought into Opal's little "community" puts a limit on the story's generous spirit—a limit that was not there in the book.
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