Woe, once again (Tuck Everlasting being the last time) I am confronted with a movie based on a classic children’s novel of which I’ve never heard before.

Louis Sachar, who apparently wrote the novel, also has credit for the screenplay. This may mean (a) that he sold out to the establishment, or (b) that we can count on what I’m told is a fairly decent novel being turned into a fairly decent movie. Since the movie seemed to be fairly decent, I’ll vote for (b).

Palindromic young Stanley Yelnats (Shia LaBoeuf), fourth of the name, is cursed by … what else? … the family curse, with which a black lady in 19th century Latvia, Madame Zeroni, zapped one of his less-than-illustrious ancestors. ⁽¹⁾ Conked on the head by a pair of running shoes that fall out of the sky (this is later explained), he is arrested for stealing the shoes (which originally belonged to a noted athlete), and is remanded to beautiful Camp Green Lake, somewhere in the trackless Texas desert (the lake is dry — why, is also part of the story). Here he makes jovial friends and enemies with several other inmates, most notably the quiet Zero (Khleo Thomas) — watch for his full name, which is also part of the story — all the while under the amiable persecution of supervisor Mister Sir (Jon Voigt) and the incompetent camp doctor Pendanski (Tim Blake Nelson), who in turn are terrorized by Warden Walker (Sigourney Weaver), a lady who likes to paint her nails with rattlesnake venom and who claims to believe that the way to build character in delinquent boys is to make them dig holes in the hot sun (the enivrons of Camp Green Lake resemble the playground of a frenetic gopher). As it happens, Walker is actually looking for something buried, and using the boys to help her find it.

The story is intermittently interrupted by flashbacks to some earlier century, when Green Lake really was both Green and a Lake, and Sam the Onion Man (Dule Hill) and schoolteacher Katherine Barlow (Patricia Arquette), doomed to become the villainous “Kissin’ Kate” Barlow (who would at some point hold up a stage carrying an earlier Stanley Yelnats), carried on a forbidden romance, one that ended in tragedy. In this rather tightly-plotted little movie, even Sam’s onions have an important role to play. As do the poisonous Texas Yellow-Spotted Lizards that abound in the area of Camp Green Lake …

I rather enjoyed this film. But what does one do for an encore? It’s not clear how one could create a sequel to the book, but if the film rakes in enough money there will be pressure on Sachar to create one for the screen … or to let someone else create it …

⁽¹⁾ I wondered what a black lady would have been doing in 19th century Latvia before I remembered that the most famous Russian poet of the era, A. S. Pushkin, was Afro-Russian, as was the contemporary French author Alexander Dumas père (except he was Afro-Haitian-French). The world was a more cosmopolitan place than we imagine, and earlier than we imagine.