'Fairy Tale': You Gotta Believe

In 1917, death was general all over England. A generation of boys had perished in the mud of France a hundred miles away in a tiff between cousins who happened to be kings. And with the youths' pulped bones and splattered blood in the wetlands of the Somme and Passchendaele lay the idea that in modernity the world would improve. It was as dead as any machine-gunned 17-year-old subaltern.

Thus it was that the English turned backward, to fairies.

That is documented in the wondrous yet oddly static "Fairytale -- A True Story," which opens today and captures exactly the need of a desperate people to believe in something, anything, as their children are murdered or maimed in the thousands.

The story, as per its subtitle, takes off from events. In that solemn year, two cousins -- girls, one 8, one 12 -- ventured into an English dell with a primitive camera and returned an hour later with photos that captured a race of fabulous miniature beings, sustained on hummingbird wings, whose innocence and beauty had otherwise all but vanished from the world.

It then took a man whose son had been sent to oblivion by the big guns to believe first in what appeared to be a miracle and second to publicize. Because that man was a world-famous author who had invented the modern mystery story and the modern detective (Holmes, Sherlock Holmes), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was able to publish both an account of the girls' adventures and the photos themselves. A four-year stir ensued (the movie shrinks it to about four months). At its center was Sir Arthur, who longed desperately to believe in a spirit world that might hold his own son, a machine-gunned 17-year-old subaltern.

Charles Sturridge, an extremely professional director ("Gulliver's Travels" and "A Handful of Dust"), has chronicled an account of the two girls, Sir Arthur and the slough of despond that was England in that most futile of all years. It's a film put together with a great deal of skill and wonder, and it's so good-hearted and compassionate one yearns for it to be one last thing: a great movie. Alas, it's not. It's not even, alas again, very good.

Great actors: Peter O'Toole plays the majestic Sir Arthur, dignified under a burden of patriarch's iron grief, and Harvey Keitel plays the American magician and anti-fake spiritualist crusader Harry Houdini, a friend of the writer and a co-investigator of the photographs. Two brilliant young English actresses, Florence Hoath and Elizabeth Earl, play Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths, who snapped the fabled photos. Most of all, the special effects work, by Tim Webber, has the power to make you believe and the charm to make you enjoy believing.

Indeed, the film's first position is that the race of bewinged mini-beings is a literal reality, and in the movie's wonder-filled finale, the small creatures mastermind a reunification between one of the cousins and her missing father that transcends the generations sacrificed for nothing on the battlefields and creates a warm pudding of longing for what the war had taken from the world: the idea that innocence, faith, loyalty and belief would necessarily be rewarded.

But note that I reluctantly call the movie "an account," which it is, and not "a story," because it's not. That's the central flaw and the cause of the oddly distancing effect "Fairytale -- A True Story" necessarily creates. It so loves its materials, it so believes in them, that there is no conflict. There's no tension, no involvement. Nothing is really at stake. We know from the beginning that the two girls are entirely too innocent (to say nothing of technically unsophisticated) to create a hoax that would bewitch the world. (Though years later, they admitted they did.)

So the movie happens, rather than unfolds. As handsome as it is, the film's pleasures are finally tinier than the fairies it follows. Consider the implicit drama in the casting: O'Toole, the elegant Englishman, as the avatar of the spiritual realm vs. Keitel, the protean American, as the crude champ of the here and now. Yet these two never lock horns. They merely shuffle about each other in what amounts to a dance of love and respect.

One thing the movie does brilliantly, however, is re-create the sense of the war's presence on that little island. The war is everywhere. Even the green English fields it so lovingly portrays remind us that so close at hand are fields of mud, blood, wire and bone.

The film's one dramatic moment comes when an obstreperous reporter, hot on a scoop, is all but assaulting one of the little girls. He's taken hard aback and kicked hard in the arse by an ex-sergeant we've seen before, on a train, returning from the front, with half his face blown away. The horror the disfigured soldier does not create in Frances, who accepts the world for what it is, is the immediate source of our love for her.

The movie could also use five seconds worth of text at the end, a last connection to reality. When did Doyle die, when did Houdini, what happened to the girls, were the photos ever proved hoaxes, what is made of them today? These questions go unanswered, and like what has come before, that is unsatisfying.

Fairytale -- A True Story is rated PG and contains a few scenes of disturbingly maimed war veterans.