Critics reviews

This might have been a decent fantasy, but writer-director Peter Hedges takes a strangely prosaic approach, focusing on the parents' inferiority issues and a subplot about the closing of a local factory.

The problem with Timothy Green is that its creators — writer-director Peter Hedges (Dan in Real Life) and story author Ahmet Zappa (yes, hisson) — cross-pollinate a fairy-tale premise (most obviously Pinocchio) with a selfish-yuppie B-plot that is both undernourished and wholly unsuitable to the broader material.

There’s a demented undercurrent to many of the best Disney movies, but The Odd Life of Timothy Green is so creepy and anti-magical it calls into question the pathology that created it. Is this really what kids want to watch, or just the product of outrageously solipsistic parents?

The ghastliness of this damp and squishy comedy is the byproduct of a confused and earnest sentimentality, a willful devotion to wide-eyed wonder that confuses simplicity with simple-mindedness.