The Book of Henry

An almost astonishingly misguided endeavor, The Book of Henry details the exploits of single mother Susan Carpenter (Naomi Watts) and her two young sons (Jaeden Lieberher’s precocious Henry and Jacob Tremblay’s affable Peter). Filmmaker Colin Trevorrow, working from a script by Gregg Hurwitz, delivers an opening stretch that could hardly be less involving or compelling, as The Book of Henry, at the outset, comes off as an almost prototypically quirky Sundance-like drama rife with eye-rollingly idiosyncratic elements – with the three protagonists painted with broad strokes that eliminate any possibility of subtlety. It is, as such, not surprising to note that, despite fine work from the actors, Watts, Lieberher, and Tremblay are unable to transform their respective characters into believable, three-dimensional figures worth sympathizing with and rooting for (ie it’s all just so gratingly cute and off-the-wall). The movie takes a turn for the worse (much worse) somewhere around the halfway mark, after which point The Book of Henry morphs into an increasingly ludicrous (and flat-out silly) piece of work with absolutely zero basis in reality – which ensures that the movie’s final stretch, presumably meant to be both suspenseful and heartwarming, falls as flat as one could possibly imagine. There’s ultimately virtually nothing within this misbegotten disaster that wholeheartedly (or partially) works, and it is, in the end, impossible not to wonder what drew the various folks in front of and behind the camera to Hurwitz’s bottom-of-the-barrel screenplay.

* out of ****