The Borrowers is that rarest of cinema hybrids, a children's film that does not patronise its audience and a Christmas treat that aunties, uncles and godparents will enjoy just as much as their charges.
Ever wonder where that button went, or the top of that pen? Wonder no more. They were probably "borrowed" by the little people who live under the floorboards of your house. Only four inches high, borrowers survive on ingenuity, scavenging food and everything else they need from what "beans" (as in human beans) leave lying around. A borrower is "quiet, cautious, inconspicuous, brave and good at climbing". Their aim is simply to survive and not get "squished". Just living from day to day is eventful enough, but when the dastardly Ocious Potter arrives on the scene, their very existence is threatened.
For all the imagination and fantasy and splendid cast (which The Borrowers has in spades), without a credible, yet curiously sympathetic villain, it wouldn't work. That it does is thanks to John Goodman's perfectly pitched performance as the noxious Potter. In the flesh Goodman is equally larger than life, through his sheer physical presence - big body and shovel head. The cut glass chandelier in his London hotel suite rattles every time he opens his mouth.
Goodman is famous for being big. Most famous perhaps for being half of the fat-positive double act of Roseanne. The series ran for seven years and he has suffered his last on-screen insult from the Queen of Flab, after 270 episodes. The pseudo-reality of Roseanne has to some extent disguised John Goodman's very real talent as an actor. His career began 22 years ago when a knee injury put paid to a career in American football. He started in the theatre (he played Bottom to Kathleen Turner's Titania). His talent has been recognised and rewarded by serious American directors, such as Joe Dante (Matinee) and the Coen brothers - notably in Raising Arizona and Barton Fink and he co-stars with Jeff Bridges in their latest movie, The Big Lebowski, to be released next year.
This is the work Goodman loves. ("If I'm offered a Coen Brothers movie, I just say yes. I don't even bother to read he script.") Yet it's his comic roles, from Fred Flintstone to Ocious Potter in The Borrowers, that are the crowd pullers and "pay the bills".
Goodman discovered the power of comedy when he was 10. Although not an overly fat little boy, he says, he was bullied remorselessly. "St Louis, Missouri, where I grew up was a very bully-friendly city." Being funny became a defence." I learnt to do imitations at a very early age and got out of bullying that way. Then I learnt how to fight and I grew larger and took my vengeance out upon them that way."
Although John Goodman's size has hardly held him back - indeed, like Robbie Coltrane on this side of the Atlantic, he seems to have cornered the market - he is not happy with his body. ("Would you want to look like me?") He thinks it has limited his career. He finds it hard "being the object of scorn".
In The Borrowers scorn - and the rest - is heaped on his character from start to finish. But that, he says, is different. "It was just the character." It is a character, however, that Goodman embraces 120 per cent. He ducks nothing.
Based on a series of 1950s children's books by Mary Norton, the film uses no computer-generated technology, but relies on the old "blue screen" technique, where the two sets of images - full scale humans and doll's-house sized Borrowers - are superimposed at the editing stage. The result is that John Goodman never actually performed with the actors who play the Borrowers, led by the ever-eccentric Jim Broadbent as the dad and Celia Imrie as the mum.
"I worked with them briefly at the beginning, we had table readings, then I never saw them again - or any of the borrowers. They went off to get gymnastic training and get fit for their role, and I did not." He rarely watches his own work if he can help it, but this one he did, seeing it for the first time three weeks ago. "It was even better than I had imagined. I was totally sucked in. Just the way that everything was integrated and it took me aback - oh my God, this is special effects."
For Goodman the "real joy" of the film was working with Hugh Laurie, who plays a nosey policeman. "The first time I was over here was seven years ago, for a film called King Ralph with Peter O'Toole. Around that time the first of the `Jeeves and Wooster' series came on. I've always been a Wodehouse fan and Stephen Fry and Hugh just knocked me out. I've been a fan ever since."
With any successful family entertainment film, there is always the chance of a sequel. Would Goodman be interested? The shovel-shaped face breaks into a grin and the chandelier rattles as his laugh ricochets around the room. "You betcha."
The Borrowers was released yesterday