Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical film review — boisterously efficient

Written by Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin, Roald Dahl’s Matilda: The Musical, directed by Matthew Warchus for the RSC, has been a West End favourite for the past 11 years. Warchus has now adapted it for the screen in a boisterously efficient piece that does everything you would expect a prestige Working Title production to do, but not that much more.

Thirteen-year-old newcomer Alisha Weir, at least, makes a bold impression as Matilda Wormwood, a child lamentably mismatched with her parents. Played by Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough in a riot of houndstooth and leopardskin respectively, these militant philistines recoil at the cerebral prodigy they’ve spawned, who is happiest when immersed in a volume of Steinbeck or Dostoevsky.

Before long, Matilda is sent to a school run by the child-hating authoritarian Agatha Trunchbull (a lavishly scowling Emma Thompson). Fortunately, Matilda has a rebellious streak, dormant telekinetic powers and an ally in shy, solicitous teacher Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch, making the personable most of an insipid part).

Matilda is laudably unusual in its theme, an impassioned celebration of intellectual pleasures. The scholastic tradition of sport as a mechanism for crushing young souls is lampooned in the draconian Trunchbull, who is styled like Bond villain Rosa Klebb in Frankenstein’s monster boots. In one scene, she punishes a boy for gluttony by making him eat an entire chocolate cake practically his size. It’s a characteristic stroke of Roald Dahl’s mean-spirited humour; filmed with laborious literalness, the routine could almost have come out of one of the Saw horror films, and is genuinely liable to disturb any young viewer with eating issues.

It’s not the only indigestible thing here. Mr and Mrs Wormwood are depicted as working-class vulgarians, while Matilda and the film’s other children, like Miss Honey, have genteel middle-class accents. It’s bizarre that a film meticulous about diverse racial casting should be so casually classist.

The songs are cluttered, and — apart from “When I Grow Up”, a starry-eyed McCartneyish stomp — not altogether hummable. The ornate cleverness of Minchin’s lyrics was handled with knowing elegance on stage but, lost here in the film’s restless visual rush, they are hard to follow. As a screen director, Warchus never quite trusts in the material and seems altogether too anxious to ensure we don’t get bored. Ellen Kane’s choreography provides some wonderful staccato business for the schoolchildren, but busy editing never lets us stop and look.

The film’s most likeable asset is young lead Weir, who wrestles a formidable load of text and lyrics with uncrushable brio, the juvenile ensemble matching her with tightly-synched vim. But this production doesn’t add anything notable to the show. Flamboyantly mounted and CGI-sprinkled as it is, it feels less a fully reimagined screen adaptation, more like a deluxe souvenir programme with pictures that move.

★★★☆☆

In UK cinemas from November 25, US cinemas from December 9 and on Netflix from December 25