Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical

Tim Minchin’s beloved stage musical loses its mojo in a grotesque and misconceived translation to the big, unforgiving screen.

Smelling rebellion: Emma Thompson as Agatha Trunchbull

Fans of the film musical were rather spoiled in 2021. In any given year, productions like In the Heights, tick, tick… BOOM! and West Side Story would have been cause for celebration. Indeed, they were celebrated. But where there’s a trend, there’s a pendulum – and the pendulum has swung. Following Sean Anders’ excruciating update of A Christmas Carol, Spirited, we now have the film version of the stage adaptation of the 1988 novel Matilda by Roald Dahl, a book previously filmed in 1996 with enormous pizzazz, wit and empathy by Danny DeVito. The stage musical, with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin, was a massive success, both commercially and critically. But what works on stage does not necessarily adapt to the realism of the big screen and, quite frankly, Matthew Warchus's Roald Dahl's Matilda the Musical is a travesty – for many, many reasons.

Matilda Wormwood is a child prodigy whose brilliance goes unrecognised by her shallow, uncouth parents (Mr Wormwood thinks she’s a boy). Desperate to learn more, the girl is denied a proper education, being home schooled in welding and make-up, until her remonstrations finally get her installed at the local elementary, Crunchem Hall, run by the tyrannical Agatha Trunchbull. In the film musical, Matilda’s parents are played by Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough, who are encouraged to mug to the gods, Graham brandishing a set of comic dentures and Riseborough sporting an array of outrageous wigs. But they are the embodiment of nuance next to Emma Thompson’s Trunchbull, a kamp kommandant with an epic bosom and a bone structure seemingly modelled on the Brandenburg Gate. Words like “kindness, patience and respect” are banned from the classroom. Her mantra is, “to teach the child, you have to break the child,” and so she devises particularly sadistic forms of punishment. One acutely gruesome sequence involves poor Bruce Bogtrotter (an oddly padded Charlie Hodson-Prior), who is forced to consume a four-tier chocolate cake. So eager is Bogtrotter to devour his punishment that he pushes it into his face, not just his mouth, although he is threatened with further penance should he miss a single crumb.

But this is the least of our troubles. Matilda herself is played by Alisha Weir, a photogenic creature who, besides her singing talent, would appear to have a mouth made of fabric: it’s hard to decipher what lyrics she’s actually singing. When Lashana Lynch, as the sympathetic Miss Honey sings, “This roof keeps me dry when the rain falls,” we know exactly what’s she going on about. Not the twelve-year-old Alisha Weir, who could be trilling about applied mechanics for all we know. This doesn’t help the storyline, which is further undermined by the musical’s crime of introducing songs that are not designed to propel the narrative, but to distract. And so there are all these lyrical interruptions, such as a story invented on the hoof by Matilda about an escapologist and a pregnant acrobat, as well as flashback numbers sung by Lashana Lynch and Emma Thompson. These may flesh out the characters but they slow down the action, a misdemeanour that will have Rodgers, Hammerstein and Sondheim spinning in their respective graves. Indeed, there’s little momentum here, while the pantomimic high jinks turn the film into the cinematic equivalent of reading a book RIDDLED with CAPITAL LETTERS and EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!! It’s all quite exhausting. And preposterous.

JAMES CAMERON-WILSON

Cast: Alisha Weir, Lashana Lynch, Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough, Sindhu Vee, Emma Thompson, Carl Spencer, Lauren Alexandra, Meesha Garbett, Charlie Hodson-Prior, Rei Yamauchi Fulker, Winter Jarrett-Glasspool, Bebe Massey, Matt Henry, Annie Firbank, Poppy Caton. 

Dir Matthew Warchus, Pro Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Jon Finn and Luke Kelly, Screenplay Dennis Kelly, Ph Tat Radcliffe, Pro Des David Hindle and Christian Huband, Ed Melanie Ann Oliver, Music Christopher Nightingale, songs by Tim Minchin, Costumes Rob Howell, Sound Jimmy Boyle, Dialect coach Penny Dyer. 

TriStar Pictures/Working Title Films/The Roald Dahl Story Company-Sony Pictures/Netflix.
117 mins. UK/USA. 2022. UK Rel: 25 November 2022. US Rel: 9 December 2022. Cert. PG.