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Page to Screen by Alicia Potter In her provocative novel The City of Ember, author Jeanne DuPrau deftly conjures the eponymous subterranean land with spare imagery. Details about the desperation within — the dwindling food supply, the ever-more-frequent and ever-longer blackouts — do as much to evoke a crumbling post-apocalyptic world as do the restrained physical descriptions. Nonetheless, director Kenan’s largely faithful adaptation provides a visual interpretation of the city that is eminently, ominously right. Not everything here feels as true, but if ever there was a movie to watch in the dark, this is it. Like the book, the film begins above ground. Against a backdrop of near-blinding fluorescence, a roomful of watery-eyed elders vow to protect humankind by sending a city’s worth of people beneath the earth. They seal the directions to the surface in a time-release box, which, as we learn in a droll montage of Ember mayors, eventually is lost. Flash forward two hundred years, and the film swoops into the urban bunker as it now stands: a dirt-brown hellhole where buildings slump and lightbulbs pop. The dilapidated architecture, clanking machinery, and rag-clad populace bring to mind a number of films, from Brazil to Blade Runner, yet Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent masterpiece Metropolis may exert the greatest influence on Kenan’s bleak aesthetic. Forebodingly claustrophobic, this is no pretty little family flick. The young leads are also spared the jolt of whimsy that often perks up adaptations of somber children’s books. Refreshingly, Oscar nominee Saoirse Ronan (Atonement) exudes intelligence, sensitivity, and grit in the role of heroine Lina Mayfleet. As she dashes to Assignment Day to discover her life’s vocation, her spindly limbs and vibrant spirit make clear that any job but Messenger will be tragic. The casting of her friend Doon Harrow is, to put it mildly, more unexpected. In a blatant bid for ’tween hearts, twenty-four-year-old Harry Treadaway plays DuPrau’s quick-tempered twelve-year-old as a gangly teen with a Tom Brady chin. That he’s closer to manhood than middle school isn’t the only problem with this pipeworks laborer; he’s also as leaden as the plumbing. Screenwriter Caroline Thompson (Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas) compensates for the kids’ lack of a believable bond by linking their fathers’ pasts. Although a deviation from the book, this addition adequately grounds Doon and Lina’s desire to flee the increasingly dark and dangerous netherworld. In all, the few variations on the novel simplify the backstory and speed up the cerebral elements — notably, the gradual piecing together of the fragmentary “Instructions for Egress” — to make way for more visual, action-oriented thrills. Such as, say, a giant star-nosed mole. For evolutionary reasons never explained, this pipeworks resident is the size of a Mini Cooper, and, in a bizarre chase scene fixated on its moist phallic tentacles, appears to embody preadolescent sexual anxiety. Later, the climactic getaway is similarly gussied up with mucho steampunk gadgetry. In place of DuPrau’s wry details — Lina and Doon’s befuddlement over never-before-seen matches and candles, for instance — are whooshing CGI effects set to a ridiculously swelling score. Though the production values at times recall the old Land of the Lost television series, the action is well paced and, overall, more exciting than scary. Not so the film’s grownups. As played by British actress Liz Smith, Lina’s dementia-addled Granny is unabashedly disturbing with her blank eyes, senseless mutterings, and, in time, very dead feet. The rest of the adults are an uneven bunch, often stepping in to annoyingly rob the kids of the exhilarating agency that they possess in the novel. Doon’s dad (Tim Robbins) is a veritable Yoda of thematic aphorisms, while his narcoleptic co-worker (a toothy Martin Landau) is superfluous and unfunny. Marianne Jean-Baptiste as the greenhouse keeper Clary (evidently one of three people who aren’t Caucasian in Ember) and Bill Murray as the canned-goods-scarfing Mayor hew more closely to their literary counterparts and therefore fare better. Yet not one outshines Ronan. She is both the emotional heart of the film and its most dazzling special effect. Whether she’s racing through the gloomy streets, puzzling out the escape plan, or, finally, looking up to the sun, her face is a wonder of luminosity. In a film about the literal and metaphorical perils of darkness, Ronan’s Lina truly lights up the screen.
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