Bronwen Hughes' 1996 adaptation of Louise Fitzhugh's 1964 classic, Harriet the Spy is a surprising and refreshing conversion of a great novel to film. Set in a timeless, harmless Manhattan filled with primary colors and devoid of distracting devices--phones, computers, televisions--Harriet the Spy updates Fitzhugh's novel by taking it outside of technology, and so outside of time. In this, it anticipates Napoleon Dynamite, Juno, and other movies about adolescent life. And it also says something--by not saying something--about the role technology is playing in isolating and dividing us. You can't have an effective teen film if everyone in it is spending every moment texting on their cell phones or plugged into their iPods. You have to strip a film of all that paraphernalia if you want to portray personalities and relationships.
Hughes saw this instinctively and pre-emptively, well before things began to get to the over-wired state they are in today. And she used the simplified setting--at once very 90s and still somewhat 60s--to bring Fitzhugh's remarkable tale of budding individualism to life. Harriet spends much of the sixth grade being bullied and ostracized for being different--instead of joining the crowd, she watches it and writes down what she sees in her notebook, and what she sees is not always pretty, and what she suffers when she's caught is not pretty at all. But she has strength of character to see her through, thanks to a nanny named Ole Golly. She stands by what she believes, does not surrender her sense of self, and winds up happier, wiser, and better liked because of it.
When Harriet the Spy was first published in 1964, it caused a sensation. Harriet's character was too unusual, too unlike her closest literary counterpart, Nancy Drew. People were so uncomfortable with the book's individualist message that they even banned it. Individualism is scary stuff -- which is exactly the point of the book--and the movie. As Ole Golly tells Harriet, "You know what? You're an individual, and that makes people nervous. And it's gonna keep making people nervous for the rest of your life."