Bridge to Terabithia is a 2007 film directed by Gábor Csupó in his directorial debut, with a screenplay by David L. Paterson and Jeff Stockwell, adapted from Katherine Paterson's 1977 novel. It stars Josh Hutcherson as Jess Aarons, AnnaSophia Robb as Leslie Burke, Zooey Deschanel as Ms Edmunds, Robert Patrick as Jess's father and Bailee Madison as his younger sister May Belle. It runs 95 minutes, was made for seventeen million dollars and took over a hundred and thirty-seven million worldwide, helped considerably by a marketing campaign that is now notorious for selling it as a Narnia-style fantasy epic, which it is emphatically not.

I want to be upfront that I suspect my problem with this film is a problem of timing rather than quality. I can fully understand that this would have landed on me hard had I seen it at the right age. It was released in 2007, when I was fourteen, and I would certainly have found parts of myself in Jess then. The difficulty is that at thirty-three I am far enough from fourteen that I can no longer reliably reconstruct what I was thinking at the time, and without that connection I spent most of this film observing it from the outside rather than being inside it.

Several things simply did not work on me. The bullying is a constant presence, and what struck me repeatedly was the total absence of any teacher, anywhere, at any point. The school appears to operate on an honour system with no adult supervision whatsoever. And there is a running subplot in which a bully charges the other children a dollar to use the school toilet, which prompted a strong and immediate response from me, namely that I would not have paid, and I would have resolved the situation in a manner the school would have remembered.

The father was the element I found most genuinely well-observed. Robert Patrick plays him, and there is real texture in how he treats his only son compared to his daughters. He is hard on Jess, almost certainly because that is exactly how he was raised, and visibly gentler with the girls, because that was the expectation of the time. It is also, not coincidentally, why not one of those girls is ever seen doing a single chore. It is one of the few dynamics in the film that felt true rather than constructed. As a small aside, Patrick has said he took the role primarily so that his own children would finally have one of his films they could actually watch, which is lovely given his best-known role is the T-1000.

I will also register my position on the family's circumstances, which is that at a certain point one must stop having children one cannot afford. That is all.