Stuart Little 2 movie review & film summary (2002)

"Stuart Little 2" is not indifferent to the problems involved, not least the compositional problems faced by Steve Poster, its cinematographer, in framing both the 6-foot Davis and the 2-inch Stuart in the same shot. It provides Stuart (voice of Michael J. Fox) with a friend about his own size, a yellow bird named Margalo (voice of Melanie Griffith). She falls from the sky with a wounded wing, lands in Stuart's sports car, is taken home for first aid, and soon becomes his chum.

There is even a hint of cross-species romance, as Stuart and Margalo go on a date to the drive-in movies (by parking his red sportster in front of the TV). The movie they're watching is Hitchcock's "Vertigo," about a man who falls in love with a woman who is deceiving him, but Stuart doesn't take the hint, and is blindsided when it turns out (spoiler warning) that Margalo is a con artist, teamed up with a snarky falcon (voice by James Woods). The falcon's advice: "Don't ever make a friend I can eat." By this point the movie has located itself pretty much two inches about ground level, although there are important roles for the family cat, Snowbell (voice of Nathan Lane), and the family son, George (Jonathan Lipnicki). There's an exciting sequence involving entrapment in a skyscraper, entombment in a garbage barge, and an aerial dogfight between the falcon and Stuart, piloting a model airplane.

Yes, reader, I enjoyed the movie, in its innocent way. It has some of the same charm, if not the same genius, as the movies about Babe the pig. "Stuart Little 2" imagines Manhattan as a sunny, peaceful place where no one is surprised to see a mouse driving a car, and where the parents are so optimistic that when Stuart goes missing they drive around looking for him--as if you could see a two-inch mouse from the middle of New York traffic.

Of the voices, Griffith makes Margalo lovable and as sexy as a little yellow bird can be, and Lane does a virtuoso job with Snowbell, the only cat with dialogue by Damon Runyon. Fox's Stuart is stalwart and heroic--the Braveheart of mice. As for the parents, Davis and Laurie deserve some kind of award for keeping straight faces. My only question involves the sweet scene at the end, when Margalo bids them farewell to join the southward migration of geese in the autumn. I think there is a good chance she is a canary, and they don't migrate.

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