FLY AWAY HOME
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1996 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: A young teenager and her father
rescue orphan geese and find they have to lead them
on a migration from Canada to North Carolina. This
is a good family film that could have been a lot
better had the story been kept simpler. Too many
overly-familiar conflicts are thrown in and damage
a beautiful and at times touching film. Still
there are some stunning moments in the photography.
The film never quite lives up to Carroll Ballard's
previous films but it is one that should be
entertaining to adults as well as children.
Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4). Minor spoilers in the
review, but most are made obvious by the poster.
Young Amy Alden (Anna Paquin of THE PIANO) is the daughter of separated parents, her mother living in New Zealand, her father (Jeff Daniels) in Canada. When her mother is killed in an automobile accident, she must go to Canada and live with her father. Now it is clear to the audience that Thomas Alden is about as nifty a father as anyone could have. Non-conformist Dad creates fantasy sculptures and builds and flies his own gliders. But Amy refuses to forgive him for separating from her mother. The two absolutely cannot connect until Amy needs her father's help. She finds some goose eggs, ready to hatch and broods them herself, inadvertently imprinting herself on the goslings as their mother. She then finds she has the responsibility to raise them and teach them what geese need to know. Her greatest challenge is the dilemma of whether to have their wings clipped or to teach them to migrate. Finding the former unthinkable, she is left with the seemingly impossible task of the latter. It is her father's idea to teach them how to migrate by actually leading them on a migration with the use of a single-person aircraft he would build. Even with so impossible a task, there are human impediments in their way including a local official who insists that legally the young geese have to have their wings clipped. In some ways the plot of FLY AWAY HOME has many of the same messages as APOLLO 13. It teaches that faced with a prodigious task you break it down into small pieces and solve the problem a piece at a time. And there is a fascination for the audience in simply watching as the formidable list of obstacles is whittled down one by one.
Jeff Daniels adds another off-beat role to his collection, this one more charming than some of his other recent ones. Anna Paquin turns in a performance more like one would expect of a thirteen-year- old than of an Oscar-winner. Dana Delaney is winning but does not have enough to do as the father's girl friend (and by implication in this family film, his lover). Director Carroll Ballard previously helmed the excellent NEVER CRY WOLF and the lyrical BLACK STALLION. Like the latter film, this one starts very well but falls apart in the final act when a race is thrown in to create synthetic tension. In THE BLACK STALLION, Ballard may have been constrained by the book on which the film was based. However, FLY AWAY HOME had already taken large liberties from the original story, part of the autobiography of Bill Lishman, and one suspects that the final race against time was not in Lishman's story.
The photography is in the hands of Caleb Deschanel, who formerly filmed THE BLACK STALLION for Ballard and more recently was Oscar- nominated for THE RIGHT STUFF and THE NATURAL. His photography of the geese at all stages of their lives is flawless, though at times it looks like the geese grow much too quickly, sometimes in a single day of the plot. Still, Deschanel's ability to capture the birds in flight together with the small ultra-light airplanes is extraordinary. Mark Isham's score is generally undistinguished and usually just lays in the background. That is good because when the one song is sung it is basically telling the audience just the same things they could see with their own eyes if they have been paying attention. Frankie Lane could get away with that in the 50s, but it is a little out of place in the 90s. There is also something wrong with having Anna Paquin making a plea for the protection of the natural world wearing two pendulous earrings and a nose-ring. There may be nothing wrong with the jewelry, but it really is jarring to see it in this context.
The film needed a final sequence better than a race against time to preserve wetlands. Also superfluous was the conflict with a local game official and how it was resolved. Telling this story simpler would have been better and less might have been more. Still, this is one the adults will enjoy perhaps more than the children. I give it a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
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