Kit Kittredge tackles the Great Depression

On watching Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, I thought about the irony that a movie about families struggling during the Great Depression is being used as a marketing ploy for dolls made to appeal to preteen girls. But in a way, it's fitting: Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, mentioned in passing in this family-friendly film, was conceived as a way of saving capitalism. And what better celebration of capitalism than a product tie-in for dolls that cost $90 each, a price that puts them out of reach for struggling families like the ones depicted in this movie? God Bless America!

American Girl, now owned by Mattel, is no ordinary doll, but a socially conscious collection meant to represent particular periods of American history - from the Revolutionary era to the 20th century - with appropriate costumes and accompanying storybooks that depict issues such as poverty, racism, immigration and child labor. Representing the Depression-afflicted 1934 is Kit Kittredge, a plucky 10-year-old from Cincinnati whose family falls on hard times when her father loses his job. The movie based on her story - the fourth American Girl movie, but the first to receive a theatrical release - stars a blonded-up Abigail Breslin, the Oscar-nominated young actress from Little Miss Sunshine.

Kit enjoys a comfortable life with her mother (Julia Ormond) and father (Chris O'Donnell), a car dealer. An inquisitive and enterprising child, she writes human-interest stories and wants nothing more than to be a "real reporter" (God help her). She tries to get published by the fictional Cincinnati Register, whose irascible editor (Wallace Shawn) dismisses her story about the Chicago World's Fair as old news, and the work of a 10-year-old, which it is.

Trouble begins to befall Kit's friends and neighbors. Some of them lose their homes and are reduced to raising chickens and eating in soup kitchens. A new kind of minority - hoboes - begins appearing on doorsteps asking to work for food and raising suspicions in the well-heeled community. All this arouses Kit's concern, but the Depression doesn't really hit home until she spots her own father eating at a soup kitchen. To Kit's distress, Dad goes off to Chicago to look for work, and her mother is forced to take in boarders to pay the mortgage. There is a traveling magician (Stanley Tucci); a spinsterish mobile librarian (Joan Cusack); a husband-hungry dance instructor (Jane Krakowski). The boarders, an eccentric lot, provide some mild amusement, though not nearly as much as you might hope.

The poignancy of the situation is occasionally affecting, especially, I thought, the scene introducing Kit's basset hound, Grace, whom Kit first encounters on a street corner with a hand-lettered sign around her doggy neck that reads "Can't feed anymore." Kit's mom, bless her heart, allows Kit to bring the sad-eyed dog home. A Huck Finn-like hobo named Will (Max Theriot) and his younger black sidekick Countee (Willow Smith) become trusted handymen around the Kittredge household. When Will is suspected in a string of burglaries, Kit's investigative instincts are aroused. In Nancy Drew fashion, she and her friends Ruthie (Madison Davenport) and Stirling (Zach Mills) sleuth out the Rube Goldberg-like solution to the crime.

During her investigation, Kit gets acquainted with the colorful itinerants who inhabit the hobo jungle where Will and Countee live. And at the same time, she finds a subject she can sell to the cranky Register editor: a portrait of the noble denizens of the hobo camp, illustrated by her own photographs. She's quite the prodigy, too, producing with her little box-camera portraits worthy of Dorothea Lange.

Let's be honest: This is not The Grapes of Wrath. The movie has an artificial, made-for-television look (it was produced by HBO), and its hoboes, though portrayed with commendable sympathy, are the cleanest-looking bunch of tramps you can imagine. Yet the movie has its heart in the right place, and it's surprisingly timely as well. It could be instructive for young viewers wondering about those news reports of home foreclosures and economic collapse. Doll advertisement or not, Kit Kittredge deserves credit for promoting tolerance and social justice, and for giving young girls something empowering to look at during the season of Iron Man, The Hulk, Indiana Jones and other boy-centric fodder. - Pamela Zoslov

Never Forever

Moviegoers who only know Vera Farmiga from her thankless "girlfriend" role in Martin Scorsese's The Departed probably don't realize that Farmiga is one of the biggest talents (and risk-takers) around. Farmiga's tour-de-force performance as a recovering drug addict in 2004's Down to the Bone won her the Los Angeles Film Critics Best Actress award, despite the fact that the movie - a frugally budgeted indie - was barely released. In Never Forever, Farmiga gives another incredibly brave, lived-in performance as Sophie, a suburban housewife who embarks upon a reckless affair with a Korean immigrant. The fact that she's doing it to save her marriage - Andrew (David McInnis), Sophie's Korean-American husband, recently attempted suicide after discovering that he was infertile - doesn't make her impulsive, self-destructive behavior any less shocking. Even though Sophie and Jihah's (Ha Jung-woo) "affair" is strictly a business transaction (she offers him $300 per sexual encounter; $30,000 if he impregnates her), the couple's prolonged intimacy brings some unwanted emotions to the surface that neither one of them can rationalize or deny.

Never Forever is worth seeing for Farmiga, who brings the kind of tightly coiled intensity - and yes, wanton abandon - to the sort of role that used to be Julianne Moore's stock in trade. There's nothing false or "actressy" about Farmiga; her piercing blue eyes gaze right into the inner recesses of your soul. I only wish that the movie itself were better. Korean-born writer-director Gina Kim ladles on too many melodramatic twists and turns, particularly in the film's lugubrious second half. And many of the supporting performances (particularly McInnis') are flat and borderline amateurish. She does, however, bring a distinctly feminine touch to material that could have played like a retrograde male wish-fulfillment fantasy. I'd like to see what Kim could do with another script, preferably one written by somebody else. - Milan Paurich

Never Forever: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 2 and 8:40 p.m. Sunday, July 6 at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., 216-421-7450.

Savage Grace

It was 16 years ago that director Tom Kalin gave us Swoon, a film that would become a New Queer Cinema classic about two gay lovers who kill a 14-year-old boy. He turned difficult subject matter into an arthouse hit. Kalin has returned to taboo matters with his long-awaited follow-up, Savage Grace. Based on a nonfiction book by Natalie Robins and Steven M.L. Aronson (that recreated this horrifyingly true tale through the use of letters and testimonies), it chronicles a family so fucked up, the mother sleeps with her own son and, when she realizes he didn't come, finishes him off with a hand job.

As well-acted and beautifully filmed as Kalin's drama is, it's simply not very good. That becomes clear early on when a droll voiceover instructs us to watch closely for the problems that exist between old money man Brooks Baekeland (Stephen Dillane) and his model wife Barbara (Julianne Moore). Since we see them arguing passionately on a regular basis, we don't need to be told their marriage isn't a match made in heaven. But the voiceover, obviously used to stay faithful to the book, comes and goes randomly. And it's not even necessary. We know the marriage stinks when we see Barbara get so angry with Brooks as they're leaving a party that she goes home with the first stranger she can flag down right in front of all their friends. It's not a pretty sight.

As the marriage deteriorates and ultimately ends in divorce, their one and only son Antony (Eddie Redmayne) gravitates toward his mother. Almost as a form of defiance, however, he takes up with a handsome young man after his girlfriend (Elena Anaya) leaves him for his father. I told you this family was fucked up. All the actors are terrific here. Moore ably bursts into Barbara's blind rages, Dillane is perfectly debonair and detached as the upper-class Brooks, and Redmayne makes Antony seem disturbed without making him appear deranged (though he reportedly did show signs of schizophrenia early on). Where the movie has its limits is in its inability to find a center. No character is ultimately sympathetic in any way, and as a result you don't feel anything for the characters when they reach their tragic ends. - Jeff Niesel

Opens Friday at the Cedar Lee Theater, 2163 Lee Rd., Cleveland Heights, 440-564-2034, clevelandcinemas.com.

Wanted

This supercharged action thriller jam-packed with incredible, over-the-top special effects will leave you clinging to the edge of your proverbial seat - at least until the wheels fall off. Wanted, based upon Mark Millar's intense comic-book series of the same name, tells a story of revenge and heroism. James McAvoy is the perfect pick for Wesley Gibson, a nerdy 25-year-old nobody whose life consists of being chewed out by his dreadful boss, watching his best friend sleep with his unappreciative girlfriend and dealing with a series of anxiety attacks.

Wes accepts the fact that he will most likely amount to nothing, that is until Fox (Angelina Jolie) enters the picture, setting the movie off with an explosive car chase. Jolie is her usual vamped-up and tattooed self as the mysterious woman who recruits Wes into a deadly secret society, known as the Fraternity, led by Sloan (played by Morgan Freeman in a surprisingly edgier performance). Suddenly, Wes discovers his killer instincts, though he must also realize fate may have nothing to do with his newfound destiny. Although the first half will have your adrenaline pumping, Wanted loses its thrill toward the end, with its drawn-out scenes and a slightly predictable ending. However, there's enough violence, sex and humor mixed with inventive action sequences that will leave you wanting more. - Lauren Yusko