Matilda

Last week, we stayed in at the Fortress of Ineptitude to watch a movie from 1996, Matilda.






If all you know of Roald Dahl’s working is watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, you can see that Matilda is firmly and clearly a product of Dahl’s imagination with extremely bizarre actions involving impossibly clueless adults.



Matilda Wormwood is born to two parents who are the most oblivious individuals you may ever see.  Her father (played by Danny Devito who also directed the film and provides narration) is an unscrupulous car salesman focused on illegal ways to cheat his customers. Illegal enough that he is under surveillance by the FBI but he is oblivious to their very obvious presence staked outside his house.  Her mother (Rhea Perlman, Danny’s real life wife) is distracted by bingo and celebrity pop culture. The FBI outside the house have fooled her mother into thinking they are speed boat salesmen. Both of Matilda’s parents have zero concern about anything outside of their own interests and whatever happens to be on TV.




Young Matilda, by contrast, is very much aware of the men outside her home, who they are and why they are and why they are there. 




Matilda is extraordinarily intelligent, spelling her own name while she’s still an infant. Desperate to learn and to read, young Matilda navigates her own way to the local library and proceeds to read every book in the children’s section, then she moves on to the rest of the library.  Besides absorbing every book she gets her hands on, Matilda is preternaturally gifted at math, capable of doing the most complex sums in her head. Matilda is also capable of intellectually discerning reasoning more than most alleged adults.


And there’s the weird stuff that happens. Things move or explode around Matilda, usually when she’s under stress. She finally figures out she has some kind of psychokinesis and becomes more and more proficient in the use of her powers,


Matilda is in every way superior to her moronic parents and to most everybody else.  But all Matilda dreams of is going to school, to be with other kids. Matilda’s dream looks more like a nightmare when she’s enrolled in the Crunchem Hall Elementary School located in a dank and dilapidated building that suggest more of a fortress than a school for children and overseen by Agatha Trunchbull, a large hulking woman with a fierce temper and a really intense dislike of children.  






All the hallmarks of Roald Dahl are in display with clueless adults in positions of authority they have no business being in, a fact that the kids in the story are all to brutally aware of.


But Matilda Wormword is more than just aware; she has an uncanny grasp of not just how the world works but why it is the way it is and furthermore, she has the smarts and the power to do something about it.


I suppose if Stephen King were at the helm of this story instead of Roald Dahl, Matilda would well be on her way to a life of rage and vengeance, using her power and intelligence force her will on the world. But Matilda, for all her amazing gifts, is remarkably humble. Her desires are relatively small: to love, be loved and be free to learn.  


To this end, it is fortunate that there is one adult Matilda’s world who is not clueless and selfish, Miss Jennifer Honey, her teacher at the school, Miss Honey is a woman of incredible kindness and empathy compared to the standards of the real world, never mind compared to the heartless and brainless oafs that populate Matilda’s world. If the Wormwoods and Miss Trunchbull are excessively selfish and brutish beyond belief, Miss Honey is also beyond belief herself, gifted with almost limitless grace and empathy, despite a tale of  childhood woe. Miss Honey was 2 when her mother died, only 5 when her father died as well, reportedly of suicide.  Then she came to be under the ruthless and vicious care of her aunt, Agatha Trunchbull who relentlessly separated Miss Honey from her parents’ legacy, their home and all the possessions within.





This is when Matilda gets to do something new. Up until now, Matilda’s gifts had been in service to surviving a life bereft of kindness, love and attention. Now she has a chance to use her gifts for others. With the help of her increasing control of her telekinetic powers, Matilda leads a takedown of Agatha Trunchbull that drives her from Miss Honey’s childhood and from the school. Miss Honey is happy to have her home back and the kids are happy that someone who hates children is no longer running the school (Miss Honey takes over running the school.


And Matilda gets her own happy ending when her parents finally notice that the guys watching their house are cops and they have to flee to Guam. But not before signing adoption papers (which Matilda had drafted up years earlier and hid in her mother’s purse for this eventuality) to let Miss Honey become Matilda’s mom. 


To paraphrase Willy Wonka, “Do you know what they say about the girl who got everything she ever wanted? She lived happily ever after.” 






Matilda is very much a fairy tale. Not just for Matilda’s powers but the absurd limits pushed when it comes to the world she lives in.  The fact that Matilda is even alive after the absurd lack of attention from her parents strains credibility.


Although set in what looks like sunny California, the story’s British roots show through. Crunchem Hall and Agatha Trunchball would be very much at home under the grey skies of Lancashire or some other dreary British locale. But the Wormwood’s penchant for self-gratification, aversion to learning and obsession with TV is a definitively American.  



My daughter Randie discovered this movie years ago when she was much younger. Given the cluelessness of the adults around her (and I’m counting myself in that number), I can see how Matilda appealed her imagination.