June 29, 2003

Whale Rider

If Whale Rider had been a Disney movie, it would have been absolutely dreadful; made by a bunch of New Zealand indie filmmakers, it came out as a surprisingly intelligent and effective (though certainly not innovative) family drama. The plot -- a spunky Maori girl wins her crusty, traditionalist grandfather's approval, despite not being a boy -- doesn't sound promising. But despite being every bit as sentimental as that summary would suggest, Whale Rider was a charming little movie. Part of it has to do with the lead actress, Keisha Castle-Hughes. Child actors are generally abhorrently cute, but Castle-Hughes' performance as Paikea reminded me of the child actors Jafar Panahi dug up for The Mirror and The White Balloon. She's got a very natural, winning screen presence; I suspect she's going to grow up to be breathtaking; I hope she doesn't lose her on-screen comfort. And her interactions with Rawiri Paratene, playing her grandfather, Koro, are brilliantly underplayed.

Beyond the acting (and the lovely New Zealand countryside), the secret of Whale Rider, V. and I decided, is that it was willing to make her grandfather's resistance to Pai wholly credible. Her grandfather is a tribal leader who has been awaiting a chief who can resurrect the small rural town, seeming entirely populated by Maori, in which he and his family live. Koro's relentless drive to shape a new prophet has driven his eldest son to Europe and life as an artist and his second son -- passed over by the order of his birth -- to a cheerful, beer-fueled, and inert life. Paikea is named after the mythic founder of the Maori people, but she's a girl. We know how this is going to turn out, of course, but unlike the crusty-old-men with hearts-of-gold in Pollyanna or The Secret Garden, Koro's beliefs seem to have had genuine negative consequences. Even though we see that Koro's operating within the framework that he understands, and even though he's depicted flatteringly, he's run off his two children and he's in the process of running off his only grandchild. Until a literal miracle forces him to reevaluate his beliefs, Koro is a sympathetic, nuanced jerk, and children's movies could use more of the type.

posted at 11:40 PM | 3 comments

(indie) (movie)