I confess to not having read the book. Someone in another review here mentions Hallmark, and ten minutes into this movie version of the bestseller, Hallmark is exactly what I was thinking. Everything about the simplifications of this story fit that kind of grossly simplified moral world. Here's a young girl somehow surviving in a swamp, in a shack in a swamp, first with her brutalizing father who has driven his wife and other children away, and then entirely on her own, with no obvious means of support except a small bit of fishing, which would hardly put food on the table, let alone provide for all her needs, clothes, home maintenance etc.
Next we meet the black couple who run the local convenience store, and begin to take pity on her, and then we cut to the present tense, where she's inexplicably, with no evidence, up in court in a kind of to-kill-a-mocking-bird atmosphere, accused of the murder of a body that was found in the opening scene. If this is not feeling contrived, I'm not reviewing it well, because it is in fact one of the most lazy, contrived, shallow, and unconvincing setups I've seen in any movie, possibly ever.
I've no idea what the book is like, or if it's for impressionable 10-year-olds, but if the claims that the movie is exactly like it, as so many reviewers here have said, then I'm glad I didn't waste even longer wading through its swampy nonsense.
Next we meet the black couple who run the local convenience store, and begin to take pity on her, and then we cut to the present tense, where she's inexplicably, with no evidence, up in court in a kind of to-kill-a-mocking-bird atmosphere, accused of the murder of a body that was found in the opening scene. If this is not feeling contrived, I'm not reviewing it well, because it is in fact one of the most lazy, contrived, shallow, and unconvincing setups I've seen in any movie, possibly ever.
I've no idea what the book is like, or if it's for impressionable 10-year-olds, but if the claims that the movie is exactly like it, as so many reviewers here have said, then I'm glad I didn't waste even longer wading through its swampy nonsense.