‘Next time, we should invite Leslie to go. She’d like that.’

 

Autumn sends many of us back to the films we first met as children, and which we now file under nostalgia, a word that tends to flatter what was in fact distress. Bridge to Terabithia (2007) is, for me, the least forgiving of these. It was marketed in the wake of The Chronicles of Narnia, with trailers that promised a hidden kingdom and a war against darkness. What it delivers is smaller and harsher: two children build a world out of almost nothing, and one of them is not able to return from it.

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The fantasy functions as the groundwork for the grief. Terabithia is assembled from the children’s own materials, so its giants and dark lords are only as large as two imaginations make them. This is why the loss registers twice. Leslie dies, and the one place in which Jess Aarons has felt free to be himself dies with her, since a kingdom sustained by two people cannot survive the removal of one.

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The death comes without preparation. Leslie Burke has been the one bright thing in Jess’s grey life: the new girl who wins the playground race, who talks of kings and giants as though she has met them, and who gives him a country to rule. Then, one wet day, Jess is away on a trip, and Leslie swings across the creek on a rope she has used many times before. It breaks.

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We are not shown her fall. This decision, more than any line of dialogue, accounts for the film’s reputation. The camera stays with Jess, who is happy, and follows him home to a house that already knows. The news reaches him as it tends to reach us, as an alteration in the room: the careful faces of the adults, a question that nobody will answer as he wants it answered. By the time anyone says it aloud, the scene has told us, and we have started to refuse it alongside him.

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What follows offers no consolation. Jess does not weep at the expected moment. He runs, he lashes out, he shuts out his younger sister, and for a time he insists that nothing has happened. The film declines to treat sadness as one dignified note. Children grieve obliquely, in the wrong rooms and towards the wrong people, and Terabithia permits Jess to be wrong. It permits him guilt as well, which is its most acute observation. His sorrow is bound up with the thought that he was elsewhere, and that one small decision, to ask a friend along on an ordinary day, might have altered everything. Nobody talks him out of it, because no argument could.

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The story’s origins bear on this. Katherine Paterson wrote the novel in the late 1970s while helping her young son David cope with the death of his best friend, who had been struck by lightning. David later co-wrote the screenplay. The restraint of the film reflects it. Little here is engineered to draw tears; it is concerned with being faithful to a child’s disbelief, and the crying follows as a by-product.

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Then there is the bridge. In the closing scenes Jess builds a real one across the creek, leads his sister May Belle over it and crowns her queen of the place. Many viewers read this as consolation, and the reading is understandable. Yet consider what it requires of him: to hand on the thing he loved most, knowing that the person who gave it to him will never see it passed on. That is hardly recovery. It looks more like survival where no alternative exists.

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This may explain why the film stays with people. Adults commonly protect children from death by hurrying past it, whereas Terabithia stops and allows it to be as large as it is. It also assumes, as few family films do, that its audience can bear this. Those who saw it in 2007 are now in their twenties, and a good many report the same thing: they had no idea what was coming. The film never insists that you will feel better afterwards. It asks only that you understand and allow childhood grief.

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Image credit: Into Film