The Young and Prodigious T.S. Spivet (2013)

Jean-Pierre Jeunet's adaptation of Reif Larsen's novel arrives bearing all the familiar signatures of its director: saturated color, fussy visual invention, and a small boy with an oversized interior life. T.S. Spivet is a ten-year-old cartographer who stows away on a freight train to accept an award from the Smithsonian, and the film follows him with a gentle, twinkling patience. It is a coming-of-age story about grief and family silence, and it handles both with sentiment instead of sermon. The cast is white, the romance is absent, and the perpetual motion machine is a whimsical contraption, not an energy parable. On the great ledger of contemporary social consciousness, this one barely registers a pulse. It is a film about a clever child and a dead brother, and it wants nothing more than to make you cry about both.

There are flickers, though they remain flickers. The trucker Rick carries a photograph of himself in military garb aiming a machine gun at an Arab's head, a post-9/11 artifact the film acknowledges with a shrug and never revisits. Ms. Jibsen, the Smithsonian director, exploits the boy for her own reflected glory, and a talk-show host named Roy does the same, so the film does nurse a mild suspicion of institutional vanity and media appetite. That is satire of self-interest, not an economic argument, and it never hardens into a thesis. The recurring complaint that adults talk over children lands softly, a moral delivered through tears at a podium. Nobody is being lectured. Somebody is simply being sad in a nice hat.

What we have, then, is a handsome and largely harmless curiosity, the kind of European confection that treats childhood as a series of charming tableaux. It won a César for its cinematography and lost a great deal of money, which feels about right for a film this uninterested in the arguments of its moment. Recommended for admirers of quirk with an appetite for pathos. Everyone else may find the pulse faint.