In the meantime, he’s an outcast, even in his own home, where his farm parents are embittered by the misfortune they consider him to be. Simon, so tiny at birth that he was delivered with a sneeze rather than a contraction, believes he was put on Earth for a reason, and buffers the cruelty and insensitivity of people around him with the knowledge that “things will be different when God makes me a hero.”
Simon’s religious challenging of Gravestown’s humorless Reverend Russell (David Strathairn) and sourpuss Sunday school teacher Miss Leavy (Jan Hooks) have them declaring him an infidel, while, in fact, he’s the most religious person in town.
He’s a comic figure given an endless string of one-liners that play off his size in the same way dirty jokes play off the ages of the characters in Johnson’s scripts for the “Grumpy Old Men” movies. While Simon/Owen remains a fascinating character, and is played with the ease of a veteran by sixth-grade discovery Ian Michael Smith, Johnson treats him as something like a live-action toy or a smart, exotic pet. As it was, the author insisted on the character name change and a distanced writing credit (the movie is “suggested by” the novel rather than “based upon” it), and wished the filmmakers luck. Simon Birch, an 11-year-old dwarf with a big faith, would be named Owen Meany if Irving felt Johnson had taken a fair run at the novel instead of using its first chapter as a jumping-off point. The sap is flowing early this year in fictional Gravestown, Maine, the primary setting of John Irving’s complex novel “A Prayer for Owen Meany” and for filmmaker Mark Steven Johnson’s simple “Simon Birch,” a syrupy extract of the book.
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