Disney's latest live action offering "The Odd Life of Timothy Green" is certainly the most original offering the studio has ever made in recent memory and yet it is also the weirdest. Married couple Cindy and Jim Green (Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton of Warrior) had exhausted all efforts to bear a child so one night, before closing the chapter and moving forward with their lives, they wrote all the qualities they wanted if they had one, put it in a wooden box and buried it on their backyard.
A few hours later, after a freak storm, a young boy (CJ Adams) comes out of the spot where they buried the wooden box and the Green couple suddenly have an instant son Timothy.
Parents all of a sudden, the Greens find ways to integrate their son into the world that they revolve: the small all-American town of Stanleyville.
Peter Hedges who wrote the brilliant screenplay adaptations of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape" (based from his own novel) and his Oscar nominated script of Nick Hornby's About A Boy ably directed his film for this is his forte. Jennifer Garner and Joel Edgerton bring in credible performances. 2-time Oscar winner Dianne Wiest's grumpy matriarch of the company where the Green couple work, M. Emmet Walsh's Uncle Bub and Ron Livingston, channeling his iconic role in the cult classic Office Space are the standouts among the supporting cast.
However, the best performance in the film comes from Timothy Green himself, the child actor CJ Adams. Appearing only in his second film after 2007's Dan in Real Life, Adams gives the right amount of charm as the unusual titular character. He was born to play this role. If there are any awards for best performance of a child actor in 2012, CJ Adams is definitely a surefire nominee.
A dark bittersweet unusual family film, The Odd Life of Timothy Green gives the right amount of sentiment that's fit for a family day at the movies.
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