Movie Review: Kit Kittredge: An American Girl

In the early years of the Great Depression, with her family struggling mightily with finances, 10-year-old Kit Kittredge, living in what is to become a boarding house in Cincinnati, dreams of being a newspaper reporter

GENRE: Comedy-drama

RELEASE DATE: July 2, 2008

RUNNING TIME: 101 minutes

VIOLENCE FACTOR: Nothing to worry about

RACY? Not at all

You like the Kit Kitteredge doll? the film asks in advance. You enjoyed the tie-in book? Then here's the same character in a movie. And, nice surprise, it's a respectable family film, not just a glorified commercial.

Product placement doesn't have to be sneaky. In Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, it's fundamental to the fabric of the film, so there's no subterfuge.

Will wonders never cease.

The leisurely and low-keyed Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, aimed primarily at the underserved audience of young girls, beckons kids familiar with the namesake historically-themed doll, to be sure. But it also presents itself as an entertaining history lesson about the Great Depression. Grandchildren will find it casually enlightening, grandparents relatively painless to sit through.

Abigail Breslin, who earned an Oscar nomination for her role in Little Miss Sunshine, stars as a 10-year-old living in Cincinnati in 1934. When her father, played by Chris O'Donnell, loses his car dealership and moves to Chicago to find work, her mother, Julia Ormond, fearing foreclosure, takes in a group of boarders. They're a colorful group, played by Jane Krakowski, Stanley Tucci, Joan Cusack, and Glenne Headly.

Meanwhile, Kit, aspiring to be the youngest reporter in the history of journalism, pitches a story to the editor (Wallace Shawn) of the Cincinnati Register; he rejects the story. But when items disappear from her family's home, and hoboes are immediately blamed, Kit sets out to investigate the crime and write about it.

Although there's a blandness to the proceedings, director Patricia Rozema's low-key film (co-executive-produced by an American girl named Julia Roberts) displays an appropriately old-fashioned modesty. Its surprises are mild but effective, and its rhythms, concerns, and lack of technical pyrotechnics are a throwback to a slower, simpler time. Several members of the supporting cast ham it up, as if the kids need quotation marks around the dialogue to "get it," but Breslin, Ormand, and O'Donnell make for a pleasingly natural nuclear family. In a summer bursting with amped-up superhero flicks, this understated, G-rated alternative is a welcome one, calling to the family audience from the valley of the dolls — American Girl dolls, that is.

GP Rating System:
Three Grands = Bravo, don't miss it.
Two Grands = Good enough, don't dismiss it.
One Grand = Okay, even if we dis it.