A Wild Child Revisited

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By Newsweek Editors

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Kipling purists may not cotton to Disney's new live-action version of The Jungle Book, but it's hard to think of anyone else who won't be enchanted. Jason Scott Lee's Mowgli, raised in the jungle by wild animals, uncontaminated by civilization, is no longer the boy Kipling imagined. He's sprouted into a magnificently buff young man whose best friends happen to be bears and wolves, but he's not unappreciative of the beauty of the English girl Kitty (Lena Headey), engaged to the dastardly Captain Boone (Cary Elwes). Director Stephen Sommers and his co-writers, Ronald Yanover and Mark D. Geldman, have imposed a taut, cliffhanging story structure upon Kipling's episodic stories, turning "The Jungle Book" into an action-packed love story with something for everyone: hidden treasures, death by quicksand, a Spielbergian lost temple, ecological mysticism, swinish colonialist villains, an irresistible supporting cast of cackling monkeys, a treacherous tiger, a loyal bear and one very deadly serpent.

It's Lee's ingratiating innocence that holds it all together. He's a figure of the purest fantasy, and he plays Mowgli with a wide-eyed, silent-movie exuberance so disarming it compels belief (even as you wonder where in the overgrown jungle he gets his wardrobe). As wild-child fables go, I'll take the unashamed romanticism of "The Jungle Book" over the pseudoseriousness of "Nell" any day. Both indulge in a swoony faith that nature is inherently more benign than bad old civilization. But this fantasy is a lot more fun.

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