When a little girl decides to compete in a pumpkin-growing contest in a gourde-mad town, she and her cranky aunt wind up growing a little, too. But other problems, including winking sexual asides, potential LGBT content and some bathroom humor—stunt Grow’s own growth.
Mugford loves its pumpkins.
Everywhere you look, you’ll find pumpkin pies, pumpkin tarts, pumpkin rolls. Its residents talk pumpkins, polish pumpkins, fight over particularly posh pumpkins. It’s a place where pumpkin spice lattes never fall out of fashion and everyone’s favorite color is orange.
No matter that the rotund vegetable is technically an American import—brought to this corner of Great Britain by the great Lord Reginald Smythe-Gherkin. (One might call him the “Gourde Lord.”) Import or no, a sign right outside town tells visitors that Mugford is the “pumpkin capital of the world.”
Yes, everyone loves pumpkins in Mugford. Well, everyone except for Dinah Little.
Dinah owns a farm, but she grows no pumpkins. Her father’s pumpkin obsession destroyed him and nearly ruined the farm; Dinah was left behind to pick up the pieces. And while Dinah will happily grow carrots, peas, cabbages and courgettes, she has little use for Mugford’s favorite parcel of produce. She can make the farm work without pumpkins, thanks. And so she has.
But Dinah’s harvests are getting progressively smaller even as her bills keep getting bigger. The lettuce looks listless, the carrots look cranky, and even the courgettes seem reluctant to grow. So she sprays more and more pesticides in the hope that the yields will improve. If she doesn’t pull in a bumper crop soon, her creditors might just close down the Little Farm for good.
The last thing Dinah needs is one more thing to deal with. But that one more thing lands on her doorstep: Her name is Charlie.
In fairness, Charlie doesn’t want to be there, either. She’d rather be with her mother. But Charlie’s mum left her years ago to pursue acting. (You can’t take a squalling little kid to auditions, y’know.) So Charlie’s been knocking around Britain’s foster care system for years. But now, the system has finally found her closest relative—her grumpy Aunt Dinah.
Charlie doesn’t want to live with her Aunt Dinah. Plus, Charlie’s bigger now. She’d be ever-so-quiet during her mother’s auditions. Why, she might even be a help! Yes, Charlie’s sure that, if she could just find her mother again, her mum would sweep her up in her arms. They’d be together again—just like they should be.
Alas, finding her mum will require a trip to Hollywood and a private investigator. And both are out of Charlie’s meager financial reach.
But when Aunt Dinah takes Charlie to the Mugford market, Charlie sees, on a poster, her ticket out: a pumpkin-growing contest. Whoever grows the biggest pumpkin in Mugford will earn 5,000 pounds. And if someone’s pumpkin crests the one-ton mark? Well, that’s worth a 100,000-pound bonus.
Charlie knows nothing about growing pumpkins. She has no idea that the Smythe-Gherkin family wins the contest practically every year. But she knows that she wants to see her mom again, and this just might be her chance.
She just needs to convince her Aunt Dinah to let her grow a pumpkin.
The movie’s title, Grow, refers to growing pumpkins, of course. But it’s not the only growth it’s referencing. After a rocky start, the familial bonds between Dinah and Charlie take root and sprout, too. Charlie’s sunny personality and fierce dedication to her pumpkin (which she names “Peter”) slowly wins Dinah over. Dinah becomes a loyal guardian and conscientious caretaker. By the movie’s end, the one-time cantankerous farmer can barely imagine life without Charlie.
Charlie’s buoyant quest to grow said pumpkin becomes a curiously communal effort, too. Arlo—a one-time rabid pumpkin farmer and an old “friend” of Dinah’s (a relationship we’ll get into later)—helps Charlie as much as he can, even guarding Peter when Charlie’s at school.
Charlie makes a dedicated friend named Oliver, too. Even though Oliver’s father, Mr. Gregory, is a pumpkin-growing rival, Oliver helps Charlie with her pumpkin whenever he can. And when Oliver’s dad gets a bit too competitive, Oliver proves to be a catalyst for fair play and reconciliation.
[Spoiler Warning] Dinah eventually adopts Charlie, which is what she and Charlie both want. And Charlie’s mum, Polly, agrees to this plan, since she admittedly thinks she’s “just no good at the whole nurturing thing.”
When it comes to raising pumpkins, Charlie apparently has an ace up her sleeve: She can talk to plants.
When the movie begins, that curious sixth sense manifests itself in an almost magical way. She touches a bush and her skin grows a bit yellow and mottled, as if she’s having some sort of Star Trekkian mind meld with it. Grow quickly drops that skin-shifting element, but Charlie continues to touch plants and know exactly what they need—be it more light or more music or less fertilizer.
This aspect of Grow feels very whimsical in the context of the movie, but it comes with a few elements worth noting in this section: First, it gives plants an aura of consciousness and self-awareness. And that just might make all of Mugford’s pumpkin-based foodstuffs feel a little discomforting for some.
Second, it emphasizes Grow’s strong environmental message. When Charlie touches Dinah’s own pitiful crops, she knows that the pesticides being used on them are the cause of the plants’ issues, not the solution. Dinah soon turns her farm into a wholly organic operation, which naturally (pardon the pun) fixes a good many of Dinah’s crop problems.
To underline this environmental moral, Grow turns to Arlo, who lives in hippie-esque seclusion and has his own intense bond with the plants around him. “In case you haven’t noticed, the entire planet is out of whack!” he tells Dinah (and us). Another pumpkin-grower—the delightfully nerdy Mr. Gregory—works for a laboratory that has completely forsaken natural crops for those cultivated in-organically. Its latest promising pumpkin, the JX-8, has been reared without a sliver of natural sunlight.
“Doesn’t it need sunlight?” Charlie asks.
“Of course,” Mr. Gregory says. “But it’s undependable.” And he assaults the pumpkin with what he calls “Garga-Sun.”
The only other hint we have of anything remotely spiritual comes on Halloween, when Charlie and Dinah go trick-or-treating. “Halloween was always big for the farm,” Dinah reminisces. “When we grew pumpkins, that is.”
While Mr. Gregory clearly has a son (Oliver), he appears to be unmarried, but the film suggests that he may be in a relationship with his assistant, Kevin. (The two men tell each other “I love you” over the phone.) But this dynamic may be slightly undercut when Mr. Gregory encourages Kevin to be more affectionate with their shared pumpkin progeny, the JX-8. (“What’s a gourde like you doing in a place like this?” Kevin asks the pumpkin before giving it up.)
After spending a bit of time with Charlie, the current Lord and Lady Smythe-Gherkin (favorites to win Mugford’s biggest pumpkin contest) say that they’re anxious to return to their “game.” Lady Smythe-Gherkin, dressed in a horse-riding outfit, flicks her crop on her husband’s bottom and shouts, “I’m coming to get you!” Lord Smythe-Gherkin giggles as he runs away. “I hope so!” he calls back.
When Dinah introduces Charlie to Arlo, he acts nervous. “That ain’t mine, is it?” he says, pointing to the girl.
“We snogged [made out] once at a school disco, Arlo,” Dinah reminds him, suggesting that procreation would not have been possible. “But what a snog, huh?” Arlo says. (Arlo seems to believe that Dinah still harbors a long-standing crush on him.)
Polly returns at one point, bringing her boyfriend, whom she says is an ideal father figure for Charlie. (He’s clearly not.) When Oliver says something wise, Dinah quips that Charlie should marry the kid. (Charlie is obviously not interested.) When a store owner hears that the Little Farm has abandoned pesticides, she remarks to Dinah, “I hear you’ve gone orgasmic!”
A number of pumpkins are “murdered” as the contest grows ever-more pitched. Scenes depicting vegetable violence (and their gory, gourdy aftermath) show a great deal of pumpkin juice and innards, and they mimic a number of famous scenes from more adult-skewing movies.
Before heading to Dinah’s farm, Charlie gets into a physical altercation with one of her young foster associates. (The fight itself takes place off camera, but we do see a guardian pull Charlie off a bigger boy.) The Smythe-Gherkins employ bees to keep their pumpkins safe. (A cloud buzzes after Charlie, and we see Dinah putting bandages on the girl’s arm shortly thereafter).
A lion (yes, a lion) jumps up on a car, terrifying the passengers within. A tire rolls over someone’s foot, clearly hurting him. Someone is hit on the head with a spinning sign. Dinah threatens someone with a shotgun full of salt.
Dinah’s assistant, Boris, decks Charlie up in what looks like a tiny Hazmat suit and tells her to spray weed killer on Dinah’s crops. (The chemical concoction has a label that reads, “Keep out of reach of children.”) Charlie faints as she sprays—due, the movie suggests, to the girl’s near-psychic connection with plants. “It felt like someone was spraying in my face,” she says. (Later, Boris accidentally does spray himself in the face, much to his discomfort.)
We hear about four or five misuses of God’s name. Someone exclaims, “Sweet Monty Don,” which sounds a bit scandalous but actually references a type of pea.
Polly’s beau opens a bottle of champagne.
Although Polly eventually helps create an adoption plan for Charlie, her actions are selfishly motivated. She chose to pursue her career rather than raise her daughter, which clearly devastated Charlie, since it serves as Charlie’s motive for growing a pumpkin to begin with. Polly does come back to retrieve Charlie, but her motives are mixed—and that’s putting it charitably.
Looking for some special natural fertilizer, Arlo mentions that he’s got a “plop dealer.” He takes Dinah and Charlie to a safari park to pick up some lion dung. (Arlo picks up a hunk, sniffs it and licks it.) Someone else is surrounded by manure as he naps. When he wakes up and tries to walk, he predictably slips.
We hear some flatulence. Arlo urinates on a newly christened pumpkin patch, almost as if it was a sacrament. (When Arlo begins urinating, the camera switches to a stream of water that turns out to be just someone pouring tea.)
Boris tries to blackmail his boss. A couple of pumpkin farmers resort to some very duplicitous means for competitive advantage. Charlie tries to spy on the Smythe-Gherkin pumpkins, but she’s chased away by bees. (“I don’t approve of setting bees on people, but you shouldn’t be trespassing,” Dinah scolds Charlie.)
Charlie also shoplifts a pouch of pumpkin seeds. (When Dinah notices after the fact, she tells Charlie she’ll need to pay for them.) As Dinah buys Charlie school supplies, she jokes that she’ll likely need to sell “a kidney or two.”
As Charlie and Dinah work at growing the largest pumpkin in Mugford history, Charlie bemoans that she’s seen larger pumpkins in town. Dinah tells her to not let that trouble her too much: The contest is based on weight, not size, and the weight is sometimes all in the rind.
“Doesn’t matter what the surface looks like,” she says. “Inside is what makes a champion.”
It’s a nice little metaphor found in a nice little movie. But ironically, that sweet overall package hides a few noteworthy problems itself.
Some of Grow’s issues feel as dependent on who’s watching the movie as much as the movie itself. For instance, Grow’s “chemicals are bad” message, while certainly a much-debated issue, would feel more at home in a political debate than as a core theme of a children’s movie. Charlie’s supernatural ability to communicate with plants may strike some families as akin to magic.
And while Grow supports the idea of adopting children from foster care—a loving and selfless act—Charlie still had to endure the loss of a parent (by the parent’s own needlessly selfish choices, no less) to get there.
But other problems—problems that, I might add, could’ve easily been avoided—further stunt Grow. Winking sexual asides, potential LGBT content and a surprising bit of bathroom humor undercut the movie’s sweetness. Grow can even feel a little sloppy at times, hurting the overall narrative.
Pumpkins have a lot of uses. But most famously, they’re turned into jack-o’-lanterns. And to me, Grow feels a little like a typical, old-school jack-o’-lantern—that of the triangle eyes and the toothy grin. Grow looks nice and friendly when you first look at it. And it even has a warm light at its core. But if you think about it, Grow may feel just a bit hollow, too.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
