The other movie to come out this weekend was M. Knight Shyamalan’s latest production, Trap.  Based on the trailers, it has something to do with a dad taking his daughter to a concert.  There is a twist, though, because this is Shyamalan after all, and it is that dad is a serial killer and the police have tracked him to the venue for the show.  Who knows what happens from there, but since this is Shyamalan, I am sure there are more curves thrown at the audience.  I cannot think of a single Shyamalan film I have enjoyed, outside of maybe The Sixth Sense (1999), and little about this one interested me.  Besides, I was in the mood for lighter fare, which is why I chose Harold and the Purple Crayon.  Yes, this means I was the weird, single Catholic guy by himself seeing a kid’s flick.  At the same time, I recently completed an Ignatian silent retreat, and St. Ignatius of Loyola’s belief that our imaginations can be a tool for us in experiencing God was what I used for justifying my cinematic choice.  I am not sure what I saw did justice to that premise, but I will attempt to describe it to you anyway.

Harold and the Purple Crayon is a beloved children’s story published in 1955.  It is about a toddler who is given the title artistic implement, but one imbued with the power to bring to life whatever little Harold draws.  The end.  That is not me making a joke by the way, rather me giving you what is precisely in the film.  Actually, it goes beyond this to show a grown-up Harold (Zachary Levi) living out his life in his two dimensional and toned world.  He has many adventures with his friends Moose (Lil Rey Howery) and Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds).  “Adventures” might be generous, but Harold is able to consistently defy death with his quick thinking and generous use of the purple crayon.  All the while, their activities are narrated (voiced by Alfred Molina) by someone he refers to as the “Old Man.”  As good of a time he seems to be having, he eventually begins to wonder about his existence.  I feel his experience here is illustrative of what many Christians go through, hearing God up to a certain point but not wanting to go any deeper.  Harold does something, however, that a lot of those same Christians do not do, and that is keep going.  In his case, in wanting to know why he was drawn, he decides that he is going to come to the real world.  His friends are apprehensive about doing so, but he presses forward with tracing the requisite door to our dimension and walking through it, taking his crayon with him.  Moose is apprehensive about following Harold through the portal, but he is literally prodded to do so by Porcupine.  For reasons I can only guess at, he comes out the other side in human form, but will randomly revert to his animal body throughout the course of the movie.  Because Porcupine is small, she is temporarily left behind until she can figure out how to re-open the door.  This gives Harold and Moose enough time to begin causing mayhem by asking the first elderly man they encounter if he is the one they are looking for, and materializing a tandem bike from thin air.  On that conveyance, they manage to get hit by Terry (Zooey Deschanel) as she is driving her son Mel (Benjamin Bottani) home from school.  To normal people, Harold’s naïveté and Moose’s insistence that he is, well, a moose, demonstrates to Mel that Harold and Moose need help.  Terry is less inclined, but Mel reminds his mom of her late husband’s policy of being a Good Samaritan.  Hence, she allows them to stay in their extra room above the garage.  Mel is particularly excited about this development because Harold and Moose claim they can see the boy’s imaginary creature, Carl.  By the way, Porcupine, too, is unable to avoid trouble once she makes it into our realm.  She breaks into a house in search of a coat against the chill, and ends up being wanted by the police.  Harold and Moose are unaware of this as they wake up the next day and offer to walk with Mel to school while Terry goes to work.  Mel has ulterior motives for this arrangement, saying that he wants to help them find the Old Man.  To do so, they make a stop at the library where they meet Gary Natwick (Jemaine Clement), head librarian and aspiring fantasy author.  Mel is wary of this man as he evidently has a crush on Terry, but he is equally creepy in other ways.  Nonetheless, he does type in a search on the internet that yields few results for the Old Man.  He next resorts to suggesting that they try sky writing.  Harold immediately jumps at the idea, and Gary witnesses the creation of the airplane used to put Terry’s phone number in the clouds.  The inevitable disaster is followed up by Harold and Moose getting Terry fired from her job as the unlikely duo fill in for her while she picks up her child from school.  While Terry is convinced to forgive Harold and Moose, much of the goodwill is taken away when the two strangers are arrested shortly after being reunited with Porcupine.  They manage to break out, collect Mel, and finally make it to the home of Crockett Johnson, the author of the book on which this is all based.  It is here, though, that Harold learns that the Old Man is dead, which causes him to lose faith in his imagination.  As such, everything he has created, including Moose and Porcupine, disappear.  Terry also understandably takes Mel away, seeing him as basically being kidnapped.  Yet, he sees Gary driving away with a dejected Harold, who is convinced to hand over the crayon.  Gary proceeds to use the magical piece of wax to usher in the world from his failed book.  Once more, it is Mel to the rescue, who uses the half of the crayon given him by Harold to rescue the book character.  There proceeds a computer-generated image (CGI) battle, the long and short of which is Terry emerging triumphant.  He then creates a portal for Gary to enter his fantasy book before Harold returns to his own realm, though now more colorful.

If there is one thing that you can credit Harold and the Purple Crayon for, it is imagination.  I bring this up here because I talked about in the introduction in relation to Faith.  It is the vehicle by which Harold experiences his surroundings, but as I have already discussed, St. Ignatius of Loyola asserted that it can be used to grow closer to God.  Harold is blessed with the ability to make tangible that which only his mind can see, doing so by scribbling it in apparently blank space.  There are no exact analogs to this in Church history, and this is not exactly what St. Ignatius had in mind when he conceived his Spiritual Exercises.  Specifically, he did not intend people to make Jesus materialize with the use of a crayon.  However, there are other ways of making His presence just as real.  One way of utilizing the mind to do so is through a process called lectio divina.  It literally means “divine reading,” which should be the first clue to how a connection can be made to the film.  In practice, this involves not only repeated readings of a particular Scripture passage, but also putting yourself into the scenes elicited by these words.  It is meant to be an immersive process, which is really what you are seeing in the movie.  Another parallel, though less spiritual in nature, is how what you are seeing is the result of those who made it bring you into a beloved children’s book.  Lectio divina does the same thing, but the stakes are a bit higher, that being the salvation of your soul.  There is nothing harmful about the movie, though neither is there anything divine in it.

While Harold and the Purple Crayon is not spiritual in nature, there is another Christian aspect to it that I covered in synopsis.  I referred to Mel and Terry giving shelter to Harold and Moose as being the work of a Good Samaritan.  In case you need a reminder, the parable can be found in Luke 10:30-35.  Basically, a priest finds an injured man on the road.  The priest takes the victim to an inn, cares for his wounds, and pays for room and board.  Still, it is more Mel that fits the mode of the helpful priest than Terry.  Mom, perhaps reasonably, is not trusting of these seeming lunatics, desiring to protect her son.  Being a mother is a vocation in the Catholic Church, and she is doing the best she can with having to continue to raise her son without her husband.  The only quibble I have with her is that she might trust a little more rather than being closed minded about the remarkable things happening around her.  Then again, the Bible is replete with people who doubted the miracles they saw performed, so one cannot blame Terry too much, especially when she lands in the right place in the end.  Who does not hesitate is Mel, which is why he could be compared more favorably to the Good Samaritan.

What Harold and the Purple Crayon is not is good.  It is not bad, but neither is it good.  One thing I noticed while sitting in the theater is the fact that few of the kids were laughing.  There was an occasional smattering of chuckles, but nothing like I have witnessed in other films of its ilk.  Overall, it is not memorable, and imminently skippable.