M. Night Shyamalan's first major feature Wide Awake is such a film but it fails at every turn.
Flat, banal and shallow, it comes across as a dumbed-down and ineffective stateside version of Ponette without an ounce of that film's energy, emotion, and insight.
Shyamalan sets the film in a rich, white bread suburb of Philadelphia (where else?) as squeaky-clean nine-year-old Joshua Beal (Joseph Cross) is seen living with his older sister Neena (Julia Stiles) and his professional blank slate doctor parents (Denis Leary and Dana Delany) in a big mansion. Josh attends a fancy Catholic school for boys where he has to deal with nasty nuns and hotheaded bullies.
With his parents too busy with their careers to pay him much mind, he spends most of his time at home with his beloved Grandpa (Robert Loggia). But, as the film begins, Josh's good times with grandpa are all in the past and Josh recalls the fun times in flashback, Grandpa having passed on due to bone marrow cancer. Disconsolate about Grandpa's demise, Josh decides to seek spiritual help. Like a WASP version of Woody Allen's character in Hannah and Her Sisters, he tries Zen, chases down a cardinal from the Catholic church, and investigates Hebrew rituals. But he comes up empty. Even the ultra-hip nun from his school, Sister Terry (Rosie O'Donnell), can't help him. But even God can't stand Josh's whimpering about Grandpa. So he rains down a one-two punch for Josh: He comes to the rescue of a classmate and is paid a visit by a blonde, blue-eyed Aryan boy angel. The poor, spoiled, rich brat can now finally rest easy knowing that Grandpa is safe in Heaven.
How should a child deal with the loss of a loved one and how can belief in God be meaningful to a child? These are important and vital subjects for a children's film. But Shyamalan waters his basic theme down to such an extent that the death of his Grandpa is given about the same dramatic weight as the goo-goo eyes Josh gives to a cute 5th grade girl.
Shyamalan further demolishes his film by his oafishly plotted narrative that amounts to short and pointless sequences inelegantly linked together with Josh's dreadful voiceover narration. This narration suffers from another common cardinal mistake: The voice of a young child as an unbelievably wise and knowing narrator.
Even given all that, what could have put the movie over would have been a strong performance by the actor playing Josh. But Cross plays the role as a cute and misty-eyed moppet and his voice-overs sound as if he were reciting passenger lists of plane wrecks. The 'star' actors (O'Donnell, Leary, Delany) do nothing to help the proceedings and, even if they weren't uniformly insipid, their screen time amounts to a combined total of ten lousy minutes.
Which leaves Robert Loggia, who plays the Grandpa role for all its worth, carrying the burden of the film on his stopped shoulders. Unfortunately, by the time the film winds down, Cross becomes so annoying that one wishes Josh could join Grandpa in the celestial realm.
