‘Harriet’: A Smart-Kid Film With Some Tough Lessons

“I want to replicate my own DNA and win the Nobel Prize!” shouts Janie (Vanessa Lee Chester), an 11-year-old prodigy in combustible science. “I want to play more baseball games than Cal Ripken Jr. and get filthy rich doing it!” exults Sport (Gregory Smith), who’s no dope either. And Harriet? “I want to see the whole world and write everything down!”

As a symbol of art in general and writers in particular, the heroine of “Harriet the Spy,” the long-awaited film version of Louise Fitzhugh’s celebrated novel, is an appropriate mix of the improbable and the impractical. And as played by the sassy young Michelle Trachtenberg, she’s just about irresistible.

Whether the movie itself will prove as charming to fans of the book is another story, but it’s faithful enough. Harriet, a child of considerable affluence, has a nanny named Golly--played by Rosie O’Donnell as Mary Poppins-meets-Ann B. Davis--and two close friends in Sport and Janie.

She spends her afternoons--”my time,” she declares--skulking about a city that looks a lot like Toronto, writing down everything she sees and adding her own rather caustic observations about classmates and acquaintances (which we hear in voice-over). She’s a pint-sized Proust, a juvenile Joseph Mitchell. But when the book is taken and read to her classmates by the insufferably haughty Marion Hawthorne (Charlotte Sullivan), Harriet’s words come back to haunt her.

And us as well. All that funny stuff Harriet said about people earlier in the film? It’s not so funny when the object of derision is sitting there listening. It’s cruel, as is the way Harriet is treated when the not-quite-adults, including Sport and Janie, decide to vent their ripe adolescent indignation by treating her like dirt.

Although slap-happy with the kinds of music-video techniques intended for kids with no attention spans, “Harriet the Spy” is actually a smart-kid movie, with big lessons and even some subtlety.

Harriet has to struggle for her art (although whether she’s destined for a Pulitzer or an assignment in Havana is unclear) and learns that the written word can have repercussions. She has a strong sense of identity, but it’s locked up in her notebook. And when the notebook is taken--not by the kids but by her parents (J. Cameron-Smith and Robert Joy) after she achieves some rather severe and gratifying revenge on her tormentors--she lets her hair down, literally, a feral female raging against the injustice of the universe.

All of which makes director Brownwen Hughes sound like Bergman on horseback, but there is a lot of darkness in “Harriet the Spy.” It’s fun, yes, at times, but isn’t afraid to expose the overall nastiness of youth or the offhanded cruelty of one girl’s ego. This is not a happy little movie about the sweetness of childhood; its PG rating is well deserved. Kids should certainly exercise judgment before letting their impressionable parents see it.

* MPAA rating: PG, for mild language and some thematic elements. Times guidelines: a few scenes of pre-adolescent meanness.

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‘Harriet the Spy’

Michelle Trachtenberg: Harriet

Gregory Smith: Sport

Vanessa Lee Chester: Janie

Rosie O’Donnell: Golly

J. Smith-Cameron: Mrs. Welsch

Robert Joy: Mr. Welsch

Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies present a Rastar production. Director Brownwen Hughes. Producer Marykay Powell. Screenplay Douglas Petrie, Theresa Rebeck. Adaptation Greg Taylor, Julie Talen. Cinematographer Francis Kenny. Production design Lester Cohen. Music Jamshied Sharifi. Editor Debra Chiate. Art director Paul Austerberry. Set design Thomas Carnegie. Costumes Donna Zakowska.

* In general release throughout Southern California.