Review: Kit Kittredge: An American Girl

Canadian director Patricia Rozema (“When Night Is Falling,” “I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing”), South African-born screenwriter Ann Peacock (“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe”) and Abigail Breslin, America’s indie sweetheart from “Nim’s Island” and “Little Miss Sunshine,” together create a genuinely wholesome adventure set in 1934. Breslin is the title Kit, a 9-year-old hoping to write for the Cincinnati Register. Before getting her first byline and penny-a-word payday, she will crack a string of thefts blamed on the unemployed. The messages are girl-empowering and hobo-embracing. “Not all hoboes are the same,” Kit observes. Her character is based on a doll born and branded to enhance female esteem: “American Girl celebrates a girl’s inner star—that little whisper inside that encourages her to stand tall, reach high and dream big.” When her car salesman dad (Chris O’Donnell) loses his job and his car, he heads to Chicago to look for work. Her mother (Julia Ormond) takes in boarders, sells eggs and sews feedsack dresses. Valerie Tripp’s 2000 book “Meet Kit,” the first in a series supplying Kit’s backstory, simplifies the Depression in 1934: “About three years ago people got nervous about their money and stopped buying as many things as they used to.” Thankfully, there’s only a whisper of corporate ka-ching on screen, although American Girl thoughtfully offers a $22 model of Kit’s typewriter “that ‘dings’ just like the real thing when she gets to the end of a line.” Kids take note: Kit reads and writes, and never plays with dolls or goes to the picture show. With Wallace Shawn, Stanley Tucci, Jane Krakowski, Joan Cusack, Max Thieriot and Willow Smith.) (Bill Stamets)