REVIEW: Wholesome Ramona and Beezus Smothers a Spunky Kids' Classic

To insist on any facet of popular culture as sacred is to be hopelessly left behind, every hour on the hour. Recycling, remixing, rebooting, renaming -- no classic is safe. I am speaking, of course, of the Katrina and the Waves hit "Walking on Sunshine," a chiseled gem that is knocked off to sacrilegious effect in Ramona and Beezus, a rummage sale of a family movie derived from the work of legendary children's author Beverly Cleary.

That cover version gave me some perspective, anyway, on relative indignities. If I was skeptical about a childhood favorite finally being brought -- by the grace of God and Selena Gomez's agent -- to the big screen, the early montage of young Ramona Quimby (Joey King) committing inventive mischief set to a shadow of an iconic pop song put the film's shortcomings in a slightly more generous context.

An adaptation hold-out for almost 50 years, the 94-year-old Cleary granted permission to writers Laurie Craig and Nick Pustay and director Elizabeth Allen to create a mash-up of her series of Ramona books, which were published over several decades. The result, while hardly a crisis of "Walking on Sunshine" proportions, is everything Ramona herself is not: innocuous, well-groomed, and buttery, buttery sweet.

Miss Ramona, age 9, is not what I would call a pest, especially when compared with the pre-teens who terrorize my neighborhood on summer nights. When compared with her older sister, Beezus (Gomez), she is merely an underachiever with a pout of mitigating cuteness. When Ramona does something like squeeze an entire tube of toothpaste into the sink (as the middle child she feels ignored in favor of goody-goody Beezus and her baby sister, Roberta), Allen fails to adequately capture a little girl's crisis of frustration or the acting out that results. It's just one in a series of behaviors played for extremely mild laughs -- which doubles as a description of Ramona herself.

Certainly her parents -- Bridget Moynahan, who has hoisted both her jeans and her brows up into the mom-zone, and John Corbett, playing the silky smooth foil to yet another quirky, pint-sized neurotic -- overlook Ramona's misdeeds and bad grades. Her aunt Bea (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Bea's old high school boyfriend Hobart (Josh Duhamel) also treat Ramona like an adorable screw-up, although her fearsome teacher, Mrs. Meacham (played by Sandra Oh), offers a small respite from all the winking indulgence.

Straining for a timeless, family-friendly tone, Allen winds up with something closer to an unironically -- i.e. absurdly -- wholesome rehash of Leave it to Beaver, the television phenomenon Cleary also happened to novelize in the early 1960s. That series perfectly matched form not just with content but context: It was a pure, comforting, advertiser-friendly product of its time. Watching Ramona trapped in an ABC Family update of that same aesthetic -- flawlessly blocked bon mots flow like Go-gurt in the Quimby kitchen -- feels like being bound in a thick, homemade quilt, rolled up to a campfire, and smothered in toasted marshmallow goo.

On-screen portraits of young girlhood that don't involve twee precociousness, social lock-stepping, princess fantasies, or bumping and grinding at a kiddie pageant are extremely rare. And though Cleary's Ramona is not quite a female counterpart to Max from Where the Wild Things Are, she is a creature of complexity and some ferocity. I found the relentless sunshine of her world oppressive; even the mobilizing crisis -- it's Ramona vs. the recession when her dad is downsized -- gleams with a careful polish. Those hoping for a version of Ramona with a few shadows -- a hint of the dimension embodied by her counterparts in dramatic and fantasy films like Atonement and Pan's Labyrinth -- should dust off their library cards.