The Odd Life of Timothy Green

If your kid is both fauna and flora, how do you do breakfast? Do you uproot him from bed, stick him in the yard and fertilize him? Should you expect him to grow extra limbs? Or turn brown and wilt when he doesn’t feel well? Do you give him a haircut or prune him?

Cindy Green (Jennifer Garner) and Jim Green (Joel Edgerton) are childless and barren. Of course they both aren’t barren but the movie chooses to see them as a unit, which, while unrealistic, adds a nice touch of solidarity. In a scene of intense frustration and cruel joy, the couple imagines their ideal faux child in the form of post-its, jotting down suggestions like “funny” and “musical.” Terrible, truly, truly terrible as these actions would be for any future parent – can you imagine putting that kind of pressure on your unborn child? — for Jim and Cindy, this tear-jerking slice reeked of the kind of desperation people have right before they give up for good. Then they bury the post-it loaded suggestion box in the front yard, which is unusual as most loaded suggestion boxes are sent to a furnace or dumpster.

During a miracle thunderstorm, The Odd Life of Timothy Green begins with the kid spontaneously sprouting from his parent’s garden already full child size. The parents don’t mind that he tracks mud in all over the kitchen floor. But as Green family parental sins go, this is quite minor. The kid looks normal except for the ivy growing out of his ankles. Say, who would Tim  (CJ Adams) grow up to be, anyway, Treebeard? A brief conversation between Jim and the police following the disturbance is intended for comic relief only – this movie has no intention of clearing the legal or divine issues at hand. It’s more like, “check it out, we have a son, let’s parent!”

And parent they do. Oh, Jim and Cindy parent the Hell out of parenting. They make home-schooling progenitors look like deadbeat dads. These two follow Tim to school, to the park, to the playground, to the can … They fight Tim’s battles, they push Tim into activities for which he has shown neither aptitude nor interest, and then follow him to the activites constantly coaching and encouraging. I believe this is called helicopter parenting. But at a level this intense, perhaps it should be called hovercraft parenting. This is overparenting as an art form.  Jim and Cindy are nice people — you want to root for them, but they’re such awful parents …. I have absolutely no patience for vested-interest adults who tell other adults how to do their jobs.

Speaking of which, they all live in a town kept alive by a pencil factory. The factory is going under, which could well have served as a realistic anchor to a surreal plot. This, too, falls wayside when the solution is, “let’s make a new kind of pencil.” Really, fellas, that’s why the factory is failing? No eco-friendly writing material? Oh, and get a load of Timothy sketching Dianne Wiest (an action that gets mom fired from her job). I can only describe this particular moment as Titanic meets Harold and Maude.

Tim seemed almost suspiciously well-adjusted for a mollycoddled, newly-born, advanced collection of chlorophyll.  I liked Timothy, the “person”, and Jim, the person, and Cindy, the person. I really wanted to like this film, too, but the plot, well, didn’t grow on me. I’m rooted to the idea that the unphotosynthesized character development just sat like a bump on a log. I’d lichen it to something else, but what do you compare to strawberry-flavored poison oak?

I do have a friend who actually appeared in this film as an extra. And Meg, honey, I hope somebody buys it for you on DVD so you don’t have to invest any more in this compost heap.

Here is the story of Timothy Green
Spontaneously cultivated from earth unseen
With parents over caring
So heavily into sharing,
Escape, Tim, before you turn teen!

Rated PG, 105 Minutes
D: Peter Hedges
W: Peter Hedges, Ahmet Zappa
Genre: Foster parent fantasies
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Extreme horticulturists.
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Those who take adoption seriously.