When Jesse Tuck tells Winnie Foster he'll love her forever, he's not exaggerating.

It's just a case of whether Winnie is willing to love him forever or just for a lifetime.

This is the magical predicament at the heart of the whimsical family movie Tuck Everlasting. The Tucks have been living in the forest owned by Winnie's family for almost a century. Back when Jesse (Jonathan Jackson) had just turned 17, his father Angus (William Hurt) stumbled on a spring that poured forth the freshest-tasting water. Jesse, his mom Mae (Sissy Spacek) and his older brother Miles (Scott Bairstow) all drank from it.

They thought nothing of it until an accident should have killed Miles and no one in the house ever got sick or aged.

They had found the spring of immortality.

What at first seemed like a wonderful gift proved to be a curse.

Like vampires, the Tucks will live forever watching those they meet, and in the case of Miles, marry, wither away and die.

Winnie (Alexis Bledel) accidentally meets Jesse. They fall in love and she must decide whether to drink from the spring or remain a mortal. If this were the only complication, Tuck Everlasting would simply be a sweet love story.

The villain of the story is the Man in the Yellow Suit (Ben Kingsley), a greedy entrepreneur who stumbled on the Tucks' secret 40 years earlier and has been hunting them down ever since. The nasty man wants to market the waters and he will even if it means enslaving the Tucks.

Because Tuck Everlasting is a family movie skewed to young girls, the emphasis is on the innocence of the romance. It doesn't have much weight to it, but its airy sweetness is what makes it endearing.

(This film is rated F)

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