Tuck Everlasting

I suppose we’ve all considered what it’d be like to live forever, and here we have a parable that tries to play out the reality of it. Another movie night special picked by my wife who grew up watching the same 5 DVDs over and over, as I’m sure many of us did.

The story is simple enough, a family drinks from a spring that unwittingly gives them eternal life. A hundred or so years later, a girl (Alexis Bledel) finds them living in the woods so they kidnap her in order to try and keep their secret.

William Hurt and Sissy Spacek star as the parents, and they are great actors but they are having to do some weird accent work here that is a bit jarring. Ben Kingsley also stars as the villain, trying to find the spring for himself. He does a great job but isn’t really needed in the story.

Really this is just a gooey Disney live-action film, but the high-concept of the plot is interesting enough even if it feels a bit under-baked. It makes a convincing case that to be human is to live but also to die, and without death there isn’t really a life to live at all. The gift of eternal life is of course a curse, but more importantly it can also be a death sentence. The Tuck family have become some sort of other beings in this process.

I’m not sure it needed the kidnap plot, and to make this really hit home it needed to press on the existential nightmare theme rather than just romance, but that’s a lot to ask of a kid’s movie. But also it is about an existential nightmare so which one is it gonna be Disney?