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'Millions': fresh take on the boy-meets-bucks tale

Kids with loot — it's a timeless premise in parables that explore children's undeveloped sense of right and wrong. A child stumbles upon a bulging stash of cash. He secrets it away, shares his treasure with select friends and, after adventures in creative spending (toys! candy!), finds himself in an agonizing moral quandary: Return the money, or keep it? His decision and its fallout teach object lessons about greed, stealing, honesty. By story's end, halos are being passed out like fliers on Sixth Street.

Fox Searchlight 'Millions' 3 out of 5 stars Director: Danny Boyle Starring: Alexander Nathan Etel, Lewis Owen McGibbon, James Nesbitt, Daisy Donovan, Christopher Fulford Run time: 97 minutes Release date: March 25, 2005 Rating: PG for thematic elements, language, some peril and mild sensuality. See showtimes On the web Official movie site View the trailer   -- Trailers require Quicktime Rate "Millions"   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

"Millions" is one of these stories, a do-gooder fantasy directed by Danny Boyle. Known for the rock-fueled heroin dramedy "Trainspotting" and zombie gore-gy "28 Days Later," Boyle is a virtuoso stylist. Visual cleverness injects his films with dangerous, off-kilter whimsy (recall the infamous toilet diving in "Trainspotting").

In the family-aimed "Millions," Boyle puts his visual flights in the service of gentle magical realism, to enchanting effect. Storybook saints appear, daydreams morph into reality, locomotives speed by with cartoon velocity.

Chucked from a train, a fat duffel bag stuffed with British pounds crashes into 7-year-old Damian's cardboard fort, opening his life to endless material opportunity. Damian (a terrifically poised Alexander Etel, his face splashed with freckles) shares the mounds of notes with his older brother Anthony (Lewis McGibbon), a business-minded lad with savvy plans for the cash. They tell their father (James Nesbitt) nothing.

A product of middle-class plentitude, Damian aspires to sainthood — he studies historical saints the way boys memorize sports stats — and wants to give the money to the needy. He receives moral counsel from saints who materialize at key, comical moments. Everyone from Saint Francis of Assisi, bald and beatific, to a cigarette-sucking Patron Saint of Television drops in. The robed visitors advise Damian to spread the wealth to the poor, convincing him that the money came from God.

All this divine intervention complicates an otherwise simple moral story, which is set conveniently at Christmas for full thematic thrust. Damian's encyclopedic knowledge of saints is never explained (he and Anthony attend All Saints School, but that's a McGuffin). Couldn't he just be a natively good kid? The payoff, it seems, is Damian's climactic meeting with his dead mother, whose rarefied station in heaven has touching origins that help make sense of the celestial elements.

Money, Damian at last avers, "just makes everything worse." We've heard that one before, yet Boyle finds original ways to spin the weathered tale. Despite an artificially joyful coda, "Millions" is a thoughtful portrait of boyhood graciously short on goopy sentimentality.