Simon Birch

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

You don't expect 12-year-olds to be oppressed by ontological issues. You also don't expect them to be arrested in their physical development at about age five. But that's Simon Birch (Ian Michael Smith) for you: mascot, moral and intellectual nudge, best friend to Joe Wenteworth (Joseph Mazzello), who because of his illegitimate birth is a more conventional kind of outcast in their small New England town. Simon, whose tale was suggested by John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, is convinced that a heroic destiny awaits him. How he attains that improbable yet inspirational end, through a chain of mix-ups, mishaps and coincidences of the kind only a perversely playful God (or a writer of Dickensian boldness) could ordain, makes Simon Birch a curiously entrancing, quite unexpected treat.

--By Richard Schickel