It’s kind of a shame about Shia LaBeouf (fourth-billed despite playing the main character in this movie). He’s pretty good here. Makes his character appealing. Watching this, you’d think he was going to have a good career playing interesting, complex characters. And I mean, I guess Transformers probably paid pretty well, but that doesn’t excuse his personality. And he’s not the only decent actor, but he’s the one of the children who’s had the best career, which is its own kind of a shame.

He plays the unfortunate Stanley Yelnats IV. One day, a pair of shoes come plummeting out of the clear blue sky and hit him in the head. They turn out to be stolen; a baseball player named Clyde “Sweetfeet” Livingston (Rick Fox) donated them to a charity auction for a homeless shelter. No one believes Stanley when he insists that he didn’t take them, and he is given the choice of jail or Camp Green Lake. He’s never been to camp. But Camp Green Lake is, and let’s be honest, a forced labour camp, where the boys are forced to dig a hole every day that’s five feet deep and five feet across. You know, to build character.

Turns out the warden (Sigourney Weaver) is descended from Trout Walker (Scott Plank, to whom the movie is dedicated). The historical back story is complicated, but he and his land were cursed by Kissing Kate Barlow (Patricia Arquette) in revenge for the death of Sam the Onion Man (Dulé Hill). The lake dried up. Kissing Kate’s fortune is supposedly out in it somewhere. Another person who came in contact with Kissing Kate is Stanley Yelnats I (Allan Kolman), son of a Latvian immigrant, Elya Yelnats (Damien Luvara). Elya stole a pig, sort of, from Madame Zeroni (Eartha Kitt) and was cursed for it.

There is a lot of plot to this movie, because I haven’t covered the half of it. Yet it all flows together so smoothly that the two-hour runtime doesn’t feel too long or too crowded. The tale of Kissing Kate has real pathos. So does the story of “Zero” (Khleo Thomas). The staff of the camp burn with menace. The Yelnats family saga is amusing enough. While I kind of want to read the draft by Richard Kelly that’s all post-apocalyptic and all, the filmed draft was by book’s author Louis Sachar and holds together probably better than that one.

Though in movies of this sort, I can’t help wondering why the authorities let things proceed the way they do. I mean, yeah, the system is imperfect and fails a ton of kids. But this camp should’ve been investigated at latest when a kid was bitten by a rattlesnake. There should’ve been some kind of mandatory schooling for these kids. Certainly no juveniles should be allowed to represent themselves in a court of law, no matter what their parents think. It shouldn’t take sudden wealth to get legal representation for children.

I mean, the story is clearly half fantasy regardless. The whole curse thing, for starters. The idea that no rain has fallen for a hundred years where once there was a lake, meaning the story is actually the intersection of the curse of Madame Zeroni and the curse of Kissing Kate. And if you’re accepting that, you might as well go the rest of the way and accept that the system failed these boys in this particular assortment of ways. That’s fine; we’ll go there.

There’s also the fact that it’s sold by its performances. For the most part, the boys are extremely talented, and it’s a bit disappointing that few of them have had strong careers, with the sad exception of that LaBeouf kid. Khleo Thomas in particular gives a fine performance for a guy who had his Bar Mitzvah while making the movie.

Then, there’s the women, who I suspect do not get talked about enough. There are four driving female performances to the movie. Madame Zeroni is a small role, but you need her for the story, and my Gods, she’s Eartha Kitt. When I first learned the word “erotic,” Eartha Kitt defined it for me, which is probably why I have all this weird mental back story about young Madame Zeroni. And while I don’t reliably find Sigourney Weaver erotic, she manages to be ominously sexy here, and I’m not sure how or why. Probably it’s the bit about her nail polish. Patricia Arquette has the most complicated female role, playing schoolmarm Miss Katherine as sweet and kind and gentle and Kissing Kate as frankly deranged, driven to it by grief and anger. Siobhan Fallon Hogan as Stanley’s mother is long-suffering in an amusing way.

One of the saddest lines in the movie is when the sheriff (Eric Pierpoint) tells Kate that there’s no law against her kissing Sam but there is one against him kissing her. Because, you know, true and awful. It’s also true that assumptions would be made about a white woman who wanted to kiss a black man, and there was no place in Texas for them no matter how friendly the people were to Sam on the surface. I forget when those sequences are set—I’ve read the book, but not recently—but it would be a very long time before a black man could marry a white woman there.

There are so many good things to say about this movie, for all its flaws. Tim Blake Nelson as Dr. Pendanski is frankly not great, but he’s kind of goofy fun, as is Jon Voigt as Mr. Sir. Henry Winkler as Stanley Yelnats III is, well, Henry Winkler. And on and on. Not a great movie, but definitely a movie that deserves to be noticed more than I think it is.