MOVIE REVIEW
“Pete’s Dragon”
Grade: B+
Starring Oakes Fegley, Robert Redford and Bryce Dallas Howard. Directed by David Lowery.
Rated PG for action, peril and brief language. Check listings. 1 hour, 43 minutes.
Bottom line: One of the best films of the year
Wait: How did this happen? How did a remake of the 1977 Disney animation/live-action hybrid “Pete’s Dragon,” a pushy mediocrity from tip to tail, become the most soulful film of the summer, and one of the best of the year?
In terms of story, director David Lowery’s version shares only two things with the ‘77 model. Pete’s an orphan. And the title is still “Pete’s Dragon,” which indicates there’s a dragon (beautifully, digitally realized this time, as opposed to animated). So, all right, make that three things.
The movie means business, right from the start. An eerily quiet prologue shows young Pete in a station wagon with his parents. Within seconds, a deer crosses the road, and in hushed slow motion, the car flips and only Pete survives the accident. Then, seconds after that, in the woods, the orphan boy hears a rustle: This is the fabled Millhaven dragon of local folklore, and he comforts his newfound friend.
Narrator Robert Redford, relaying some dragon lore to a group of children, clues us in to this maybe-world of dragons lurking in the Pacific Northwest forest (the movie was shot in New Zealand).
This largely wordless first third is magic. The rest of “Pete’s Dragon” concerns how Pete is discovered, and what happens when Pete and Elliot are confronted by the civilized human world populated by the citizens of the logging community. Bryce Dallas Howard is Grace, the forest ranger who finds Pete, played by the wonderfully named Oakes Fegley. Grace has grown up hearing one too many dragon stories from her father, the genial eccentric portrayed by Redford in one of his finest late-career turns. Wes Bentley is the ranger’s fiance, whose daughter (Oona Laurence) becomes Pete’s entry into the town.
I know, it sounds dorky. Lowery and his co-writer, Toby Halbrooks, don’t treat it that way. There’s an unusual pace and a quiet focus to the best of “Pete’s Dragon,” and because the dragon growls and purrs and grunts but, thankfully, doesn’t speak, the relationship between boy and winged serpent is conveyed largely through brief, one-sided conversations. We lean into this movie.
A few caveats. After a seriously transporting first half, the second half is more conventional in its narrative beats. By design the cruelest moment arrives right on top of an exceptionally tender one, and it’s exploitative in a way the rest of the movie isn’t. Still, compared with the old “Pete’s Dragon” and its miserable slapstick and peppy songs sung by abusive parents, this is another, higher realm of emotional engagement.
This is one of the season’s most heartening surprises.
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