An Invisible Sign: Review By harveycritic

AN INVISIBLE SIGN

IFC Films

Reviewed for MovieWeb by Harvey Karten

Grade: C+

Directed By: Marilyn Agrelo

Written By: Pamela Falk, Michael Ells, from the book "An Invisible Sign of My Own" by Aimee Bender

Cast: Jessica Alba, Bailee Madison, Chris Messina, J.K. Simmons, Sônia Braga, John Shea

Screened at: Broadway, NYC, 5/2/11

Opens: May 6, 2011

"Better living through chemistry" was the slogan of the DuPont Corporation from 1935 to 1982. "Better living through mathematics" could be the tag line for Marilyn Agrelo's film, "An Invisible Sign," an adaptation of the favorably-reviewed novel by Aimee Bender. The novel and movie are both too far on the twee/precious side to be readily accepted by even some art-house audiences; twee and precious meaning dainty, delicate, cute, quaint, affected. The pace is slow, the dialogue is banal, and the performers like figures from the fairy tale that opens the film. The fairy tale, which is told by dad (John Shea) to his small, precocious daughter Mona Gray (Bailee Madison), involves a king whose territory is not large enough to accommodate the population. Each family is ordered to choose one member to be killed, but one family member successfully petitioned: "If we cut one limb from each of us, those limbs put together would equal a human being. Therefore we could all remain alive." That family stayed together with the help of crutches.

The point of the tale would be, as the story makes clear, that you don't have to split up a family at all: that's not the way to go. People can stick together regardless of their idiosyncracies, their neuroses, their arguments, their differences.

"An Indivisible Sign" is based on Aimee Bender's novel, her first effort, "The Girl with the Flammable Skirt," being sixteen short stories about the intersection of fairy tales and real life. For example, in one "Flammable" story, "Steve returned from the war without his lips. The army doctors have temporarily replaced them with a plastic disc, which impairs his speech. Luckily, this doesn't prevent him and his wife from engaging in some slightly surrealistic sexual maneuvers: That night in bed, he grazed the disc over her raised nipples like a UFO and the plastic was cool on her skin. It felt like they were in college and toying with desk items as sexual objects." Somehow one gets the impression that reading stuff like this can be better than trying to visualize it on the big screen, as "An Invisible Sign" now seems to prove.

Jessica Alba anchors the tale as the aptly named Mona Gray-seen at first as a young person played by Bailee Madison. She has an affinity to mathematics, inspired by the teaching of Mr. Jones (J.K. Simmons), an often depressed man who wears a different number around his neck each day as a symbol of his mood (3 is depressed, 42 is elated). When her beloved dad (John Shea) falls victim to a mysterious mental illness and her mom (Sônia Braga) ejects her from the house, she retreats into a shell. Hired to teach second grade despite her lack of credentials and a college degree (this is a fairy tale, after all), she will ultimately be removed from said shell by the love of five-year-old Lisa (Sophie Nyweide) and a handsome science teacher, Ben Smith (Chris Messina). Jones, Smith, Gray: cute?

Some of the classroom scenes are funny, as kids run the gamut from the bratty Ann (Mackenzie Milone) to the lovely Lisa, whose mom (Joanna Alder) is dying of eye cancer. A good job in the make-up department makes the thirty-year-old Jessica Alba look like someone just out of college, though Sônia Braga looked better in "Donna Flor and Her Two Husbands." Generally, the film is schematic, terminally quirky, and slow.

Rated PG-13. 96 minutes. © 2011 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online