Digging to China Reviews

Sweet but inconsequential, this eccentric wedge of childhood whimsy benefits from a strong, delicate performance by child actress Evan Rachel Wood. Growing up in rural Pennsylvania in the late '60s, the precocious, lonely Harriet Frankovitz (Wood) wants nothing more than to get away. She fantasizes about boarding a flying carpet, tunneling to China and even being abducted by a UFO: Anything to escape Mac's Indian Village, the kitsch roadside motel run by her alcoholic mom (Cathy Moriarty) and trampy older sister Gwen (Mary Stuart Masterson). Harriet finds a friend in Ricky (Kevin Bacon), a 30-year-old man-child en route to a home for the retarded, but their innocent flights of fancy (especially the make-believe marriage vows) make adults nervous. You know no good will come of it, especially if you've seen the recent LAWN DOGS, which deals with very similar material. First-time feature director Timothy Hutton seems to be aiming for a darkly amusing nostalgia, but is often undermined by screenwriter Karen Jenszen's script: It proposes that the mind of an imaginative child is an unsettling place, then torpedoes that proposition at every turn with sappy sentiment. "Sometimes I thought my mother was smart and really beautiful," muses Harriet, cooly contemplating Moriarty's bleached beehive. "Other times I worried that a nest of spiders was living in her hair, eating through her skull and chewing on her brain." More of that and less strenuously unsullied frolicking with Ricky would have gone a long way to mitigating the heavy Hallmark Hall of Fame vibe. As Ricky, Bacon's wardrobe (those highwaters!) and strangled speech bring to mind Pee-wee Herman, which is kind of cool but probably not deliberate.