Ever since David Lynch, decades ago, flirted with the prospect of making a film of “The Secret Garden,” Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 children’s novel, I’ve always leaned toward thinking it could make a great movie — and I’ve always imagined that movie as a spooky, earthy Lynchian dream, since that so connects with my memories of the book as a child.
It was read aloud to my fourth-grade class, and every time the characters entered the garden of the title, it seemed to be as romantically odd and mysterious a place as Wonderland or Oz: a lushly eerie gothic Eden — a paradise that could restore life because, ironically, it held memories of death.
But translating the somber magic of the book to the big screen has proved to be an elusive challenge.In the new version of “The Secret Garden,” the Victorian setting has been jumped ahead about
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