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An 'Emporium' of light delights

Kelly Jane Torrance
November 16, 2007

"Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" is a film about growing up and a film about rediscovering your inner child — although not both at the same time, of course.

The talented young writer-director Zach Helm, who penned last year's clever "Stranger Than Fiction" and makes his directorial debut here, has made that rare thing: a G-rated film that will both charm children and offer adults more than a little food for thought.

Mr. Magorium, the proprietor of the toy store in the film's title, is played with a touching mixture of crazy joy and understated melancholy by two-time Oscar winner Dustin Hoffman, who gives his best performance in quite some time. The old man made toys for Napoleon and played games with Lincoln.

"That would make you 240 years old, sir," accountant Henry Weston (Jason Bateman) says in disbelief. "You're already hired, mutant, there's no need to show off," Mr. Magorium responds. (The shopkeeper thinks the word accountant is a contraction of counting mutant.)

However, Henry is the one who needs to get back in touch with his fun side. He's been hired to calculate the worth of the store, and he can't understand how toys appear out of nowhere and rooms full of them disappear just as quickly. Store manager Molly Mahoney (Natalie Portman) insists that the "simple explanation" he's looking for is obvious: "It's a magical toy store."

Molly believes unconditionally in Mr. Magorium and his magic emporium. What she doesn't believe in is herself. She's a failed composer looking for some direction in her life. She's fully in touch with her whimsical side, but still lives like a teenager. Mr. Magorium wants to provide that direction by leaving her his store when he departs from this Earth, which he plans to do that week. Molly can't accept either her boss's impeding death or his legacy. She doesn't think she has the magic to run the store. Plus, it doesn't help that the store throws a temper tantrum when it realizes it's being passed off to someone else.

Helping Mahoney and Weston move toward an Aristotelian mean is 9-year-old Eric (Zach Mills, a boy with an impressive resume behind him and a bright future ahead). Eric practically lives at the emporium, although all the other kids there think he's weird. But the creative loner fits right in with the lisping Mr. Magorium and the 30-going-on-16 Mahoney.

"Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium" is filled with lots of good visual jokes — the real goose in the duck-duck-goose game, for example. Mr. Helm and his rather large special effects team have created an entire world inside four walls simply to make us smile. The whimsical score by Alexandre Desplat and Aaron Zigman does a lot of work, too.

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