Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid arrives from 2010, a year that now reads as a kind of cultural DMZ between the earnest and the agitated. Thor Freudenthal's adaptation of Jeff Kinney's illustrated novel follows Greg Heffley through his first year of middle school, a gauntlet of moldy cheese, missing bathroom stall doors, and the grim arithmetic of popularity. The film is nimble enough, occasionally funny, and entirely content to be about a boy who wants to be liked. Zachary Gordon plays him with a practiced smirk, and Robert Capron's Rowley supplies the sweetness the script otherwise declines to distribute.

Consider what the film declines to do. It casts a broadly white ensemble and lets its handful of minority students exist as students, without ceremony or commentary. Race is not a subject. Neither is gender, beyond the observation that middle school is unkind to everyone equally. There is no romance to interrogate, no closet to open, no carbon footprint to offset, no class struggle simmering beneath the cafeteria trays. The body is a source of wedgies, not affirmation. Neurodivergence goes unnamed. History, revisionist or otherwise, is simply not on the syllabus. Susan Heffley's mothering is affectionate and unexamined, and the film does not lecture, not once, about any of it. It wants only to get Greg to the yearbook page.

That absence is the whole point. This is a film from a moment when a children's comedy could still be merely a children's comedy, and the resulting object is amiable, weightless, and innocent of any agenda beyond the delivery of a cheese joke. Roger Ebert found it bright and knowing. Others found Greg unpleasant company. Both verdicts are defensible. What no one could accuse it of is ambition beyond its station. A relic, then, of a quieter dispensation, and a reminder that not every story carries a message. Some carry only a diary.