Kids do the darnedest things

BY JAN STUART | jan.stuart@newsday.com

March 23, 2007

"The Last Mimzy" may have the unique distinction of being the first family film to forecast the FBI's alleged abuses of the Patriot Act.

For those who may be groaning at the prospect of coaching your child on the fine points of homeland security, not to worry. The unfortunately titled "The Last Mimzy" is a charming if interpretively muddled "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" for the pup generation, stirring with childlike wonder at the phenomena of nature and free of partisan politics.

As in "Close Encounters," with which this new film shares a producer credit, "The Last Mimzy" traffics in ordinary people who are connected by an extraordinary extraterrestrial phenomenon. In this instance, the chosen ones are an alienated 10-year-old boy named Noah (Chris O'Neil), his 5-year-old sister Emma (Rhiannon Leigh Wryn) and Noah's science teacher Larry White (Rainn Wilson).

While vacationing with their mom (Joely Richardson) at their summer shack outside Seattle, Noah and Emma pull from the shore an odd box containing a crystal, a gelatinous blue object, a seashell, a jagged rock and a stuffed rabbit that telepathically identifies itself as Mimzy.

This strange assortment of flotsam and jetsam passes on an equally scattershot range of magical powers: Emma finds that she can levitate, twirl the rock on tendril-like "spinners" and atomize her hand; Noah can orally commandeer a spider's web construction and knock a golf ball into next Tuesday.

As the kids come to terms with their new powers, Larry has dreams that seem to connect with complex doodlings that Noah sketches during his classes.

What, at the end of the day, does it all mean? Adapted by director Bob Shaye and screenwriters Bruce Joel Rubin and Toby Emmerich from a sci-fi short story by Lewis Padgett, "The Last Mimzy" perhaps isn't as coherent in its moralizing as it could be, given its target crowd. There is some sense that the Earth is set on an environmentally imperiled coarse that the children have been ordained to reverse, and that people are becoming more isolated from one another as they fixate on their electronic toys.

Are Padgett's extraterrestrial doo-hickeys, which inspire the children to play covertly and obsessively, really meant as correctives for a generation zombied-out on cell phones and iPods? I'm not convinced.

As fantasy films in the kids-rescue-the-world mode go, however, "The Last Mimzy" goes about its business with a welcomely wry humor that undercuts the scenario's earnest New Age-y potential. If it isn't always crystal clear about what's on its mind, it speaks its heart in a language that kids totally get.