Cecil is a 2019 family comedy about a young boy with a lisp who changes his name to avoid embarrassment.
There is surely an audience for a movie like Spenser Fritz‘s latest children’s film Cecil, though I am entirely confident that I am not, mostly because I am no longer in the 4th Grade. And I hardly remember 1996. Be that as it may, some might enjoy this even though the target audience would have positively no clue about the 90s and those that were in elementary school at that time might not have the nostalgia for what’s on tap.
Either way, here we are. It is 1996 and we meet Cecil Stevens (Sark Asadourian), a little kid in a mixed up family where mom (Jenna von Oy) and dad (Jason London) don’t get along, terribly so. Mom takes him to hip and cool grandma’s house and a new school, where he meets Abby (Christa Beth Campbell), an ambitious girl in his class. She’s the school newspaper reporter and instantly recognizes Cecil’s lisp (especially when he says ‘Cecil Stevens’) will be ‘social suicide,’ convincing him to change his name. His pick? Michael Jordan. It changes everything.
It’s a not hard to ‘get’ what Fritz is up to, the tone decidedly off center in what looks like jabs at the times and an attempt to lower it all down to a 4th Grade level. That means everything is wildly exaggerated, particularly the adults, who are all bombastic hyper-realized caricatures well off the chart. The aggressive coach has a thing for bubbly teacher Ms. Baker (who teaches with help from the hit TV show The Magic Boxcar…a riff on this), the two all flirty with each other. The corrupt principal (who has an obsession with taxidermy) is in debt to an overweight lunatic of a loan shark, forced to cut school programs to pay his way free (and massive amounts of physical abuse that should alert authorities). Not to mention Cecil’s parents, who are basically cartoon characters.
Again, I’m not a little kid. This is humor not aimed at me. Things like mom putting actual toenail clippings in dad’s food as way to get back at him not only go over my head, they seem just repulsive. There’s plenty of constipation and potty jokes as well. At least the bullying is held to a bare minimum as Cecil becomes a celebrity of sorts almost overnight after he changes his name, and with Abby’s help, decides to sell other famous names to kids for money. Is that a thing that would work? In this universe it does. With riot-like success.
Of course there is a message in all this, once Cecil … er, Michael get too big for his britches (there’s rap song montage to fully illustrate this), and no doubt, this is the better part of the film where choices begin to have clear and easily identifiable consequences younger viewer can learn from. However, this is all very simplified and without any attempt at reality. That’s probably the point. Just about everything that Abby says comes loaded with a quirky sound effect.
All the little children actors do their best, probably wondering how life could have been tolerable at all in 1996. Asadourian and Campbell are adorable and charming, surely able to appeal to kids their age, and that’s half the battle in a movie like this. I’m giving an entire extra star to the score just for the kids in this and their efforts alone, the lot of them clearly having great fun pretending to be from their parents’ generation. Who wouldn’t jump at that chance?