The Secret Garden movie review (1993)

The film tells the story, familiar to generations, of a young girl orphaned in India in the early years of this century, and sent home to England to live on the vast estate of an uncle. Misselthwaite Manor is a gloomy and forbidding pile in Yorkshire - a construction of stone, wood, metal, secrets and ancient wounds. The heroine, whose name is Mary Lennox (Kate Maberly), arrives from her long sea journey to be met with a sniff and a stern look from Mrs. Medlock (Maggie Smith), who manages the place in the absence of the uncle, Lord Archibald Craven (John Lynch). Mary quickly gathers that this uncle is almost always absent, traveling in far places in an attempt to forget the heartbreaking death of his young bride some years earlier.

There is little for Mary to do in the mansion but explore, and soon she finds secret passageways and even the bedroom of her late aunt - and in the bedroom, a key to a secret garden. She makes friends with a boy named Dickon (Andrew Knott), whose sister is a maid at Misselthwaite, and together they play in the garden, and he whispers the manor's great secret: The aunt died in childbirth, but her son, now 9 or 10 years old, still lives in the manor, confined to his bed, unable to walk.

Mary goes exploring, and finds the little boy, named Colin (Heydon Prowse). He has lived a life of great sadness, confined to his room, able to see only the sky from the windows visible from his bed. Mary determines he must see his mother's secret garden, and she and Dickon wheel him there in an invalid's chair, stealing him out of the house under the very nose of Mrs. Medlock.

All of this could be told in a simple and insipid story, I am sure, with cute kids sneaking around the corridors. But Holland is alert to the buried meanings of her story, and she has encouraged her actors to act their age - to be smart, resourceful and articulate.

They are so good at their jobs that we stop being aware they are children, and enter into full identification with their quest.

More of the story I must not tell, except to mention in passing the gaunt dignity of Uncle Archibald, played by Lynch with the kind of weary, sensual sadness that Jeremy Irons used to have a corner on.