Batman & Robin (1997)

1.5/4 stars

Reportedly, before every shoot while filming Batman & Robin, director Joel Schumacher would remind the cast and crew to “remember, this is a cartoon.” Perhaps he should have said toy commercial. It is certainly with toys in mind that we see throughout the movie’s two hour runtime frequent costume changes, new gadgets, vehicles, and no less than three new villains. Even the characters seem to know they are in a two-hour toy commercial. Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) mentions her own action figure in a scene where Batman tries to take her on only to find himself in the grips of Bane (sold separately).
This is a shameless picture with only one clear goal behind its making, and it is not to tell a story. Selling toys has always been an important consideration when making movies like this, but none are as cynical about it. The movie is practically a convention, every shot serving to show off the latest products at your local Toys-R-Us. In the climactic battle during the final act, Batman (George Clooney), Robin (Chris O’Donnell), and newcomer Batgirl (Alicia Silverstone) manage one last costume change before appearing to save the day. There is a sense of urgency in the previous scene that fails to justify this. But, remember, this is a toy commercial.

Schumacher’s claim that Batman & Robin is a cartoon is not entirely unjustified. It certainly explains the movie’s tone. The comical villains, slapstick violence, and gaudy visuals of Batman Forever are taken to the max here with even the gothic undertones from before now a thing of the past. Clooney brings none of the broodiness of Bruce Wayne to the character, instead playing the part like an older brother or someone’s cool uncle. As Batman, he is hardly intimidating. The role is written more like Adam West; falling into one obvious trap after another, making improbable public appearances for charity events, and never without the right gadget to get out of any mess.
Also reminiscent of the 60’s Batman show is the film’s set design. They are shot with the same slanted angles and the same neon shades of lighting that only highlight their fakeness. The only thing missing are all the BIFFs, POPs, and POWs splashing the screen during the many fight scenes in the movie.

Batman & Robin’s story is really just an after thought. Surely, it is enough to say that the new villains are up to something villainous and Batman must stop them. Knowing that the evil Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger) wants to freeze the entire world with a ray gun or that Poison Ivy wants to reseed the planet with man-eating plants is not that important. You could watch this movie on mute and lose nothing. There’s a simple formula of baddies making an appearance and Batman and friends fighting them that requires no introduction. Even the movie’s subplot about Alfred (Michael Gough) being ill and needing a treatment is sufficiently told through visual cues that would make a lack of sound no challenge to understand.
While Alfred is suffering from a seemingly terminal ailment a new character is brought to Wayne Manor through Alfred’s niece, Barbara. The movie’s dialogue tells us she has come all the way from England to visit her uncle and that she is a bit of a rebel. I’ll have to just take the film’s word for it. Alicia Silverstone makes no attempt to affect an English dialect and she is shown to ride motorbikes fairly well. She is otherwise played with no personality at all and I suspect that somewhere in the movie’s development she was intended to recall Robin’s youthfulness in Batman Forever. But these themes, had they ever been present at all, must have found themselves on the cutting room floor.
Chris O’Donnell, in the meantime, brings no maturity to the Robin character at all; but spends the majority of the movie arguing and whining to Batman about how he feels like he isn’t being treated like an equal. To me, this presents a missed opportunity for Robin to take Batgirl under his wing and counter her brashness with memories of his own. But, Barbara is left by herself throughout most of the movie, while Robin and Batman bicker in a directionless subplot that ends abruptly when they realize their movie is reaching its climax.
Poison Ivy creates a sort of love triangle between them thanks to powerful pheromones she blows around like a magical pixie dust. Robin becomes convinced that Batman is jealous of him because she is in love with him instead of Batman. Batman, reasonably tries to remind him that Ivy is in league with Mr. Freeze and that her manipulative behavior is obvious, but Robin refuses to listen.
Mr. Freeze, another potential action figure, is slightly more interesting. Like Penguin in Batman Returns, he is presented as a tragic figure; but this time he is much more sympathetic, where Penguin was merely repulsive. The movie explains that Freeze’s wife is kept perpetually frozen to halt the progress of an incurable disease. This is said to be the same disease affecting Alfred, but far more advanced. Freeze needs special gems to power the machinery he uses to research and hopefully discover a cure. After an accident leaves him unable to live outside of sub-zero temperatures, he builds himself a special suit to keep himself cold and turns to a live of crime to steal more gems. By the end, Mr. Freeze is given more empathy than Penguin who was treated as irredeemable. It’s a not a deep story by any means, and all the schemings and rushings to save the day are just a thin veil to disguise the movie’s real agenda. Remember, this is a toy commercial.

Turning a beloved franchise into a big toy commercial is unforgivable, and as such, I had low expectations for the movie to have much of a story. But, as a marketing gimmick, I would have hoped for a better display of special effects. Instead, Warner Brothers, sells its toys with one of the worst looking Batman movies of all time. The sets are garish and cheap with even icicles appearing to be made of rubber at times. Outside of the sets, blue screen is used unconvincingly. The Batmobile and Robin’s bike ride against CG backgrounds, thick matte lines and all, like images poorly pasted over on Photoshop.
Batman & Robin has all the appearances of a movie that was cobbled together quickly with little thought. The story and characters play like Saturday morning cartoons with acting and special effects too shoddy to even properly enjoy it as mindless popcorn entertainment. Maybe the film would have been easier to stomach had it actually been a cartoon. Perhaps, collecting the toys is a better investment. I wonder how much they are going for on Ebay nowadays.

Director: Joel Schumacher
Writers: Bob Kane, Akiva Goldsman
Cast: Arnold Schwarzenegger (Mr. Freeze/Dr. Victor Fries), George Clooney (Batman/Bruce Wayne), Chris O’Donnell (Robin/Dick Grayson), Uma Thurman (Poison Ivy/Dr. Pamela Isley), Alicia Silverstone (Batgirl/Barbara Wilson), Michael Gough (Alfred Pennyworth), Pat Hingle (Commissioner Gordon)
Producers: Mitchell Dauterive, William M. Elvin, Peter Macgregor-Scott, Benjamin Melniker, Michael E. Uslan
Composer: Elliot Goldenthal
Cinematographer: Stephen Goldblatt
Editors: Mark Stevens, Dennis Virkler

Batman Forever (1995)

2/4 stars

There are three kinds of Batman. Gothic Batman is the subject of the classic comic books and we see him stoically doing what he does best in the Tim Burton movies and the animated TV series from the 90s. The more introspective Edgelord Batman made popular in Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy has been a favorite of comic writer Frank Miller, but largely exists elsewhere in memes. Campy Batman is best represented by Adam West back in the 1960s. Campy Batman’s Gotham City is a colorful world of colorful people where villains prance in clownish costumes and laugh maniacally. They are the sort of baddies who twirl their mustaches, tie damsels to railroad tracks, and scheme to poison the city’s water supply.
Director Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever is a return to the old tradition of campy Batman, slanted camera angles and all. When Schumacher, taking over for Tim Burton, approached the material he aimed to make a live-action cartoon. For better or worse, he succeeded. As stupid and ridiculous as the movie is, it is everything it intended to be; its flaws by design and really a matter of taste.

A common complaint leveled at it is that it is too campy and too cartoonish. I hold to the opposite view. I believe it isn’t campy and cartoonish enough, and therein lies Batman Forever’s downfall. The heroes, given what they are up against, are too sullen for their own good. Val Kilmer, replacing Michael Keaton, in the role of Bruce Wayne commands no presence, adding nothing interesting to the part. As Batman he is stale, watering the character down to a fighting costume.
Robin, the Boy Wonder is brought in this time around, and if the fans had been waiting patiently through two movies for Batman’s trusted sidekick to finally appear they must have been sadly disappointed. Chris O’Donnell as Dick Grayson (Robin’s alter ego) has none of Burt Ward’s original energy and passion. O’Donnell plays the role as standoffish and angry. His character development is nothing more than a skin-deep paint-by-numbers expression of the old saw “revenge won’t make the pain go away” and “taking a life leads to a dark path.” There is nothing wrong with such messages of course, but no sincere effort is made to convince the audience of their truthfulness. It’s merely said and Robin comes to these conclusions only when the script finally says so.
Batman and Robin generate no charisma whatsoever, all of their energy being sucked into the two lead villains.

The movie opens with the dastardly Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones) robbing a bank to lure Batman into a trap. He giggles and jumps up and down like a clown, firing machine guns at nothing in particular as police helicopters swarm above. The burnt side of his face is improbably symmetrical in relation to the other side: a purple bit of prosthetic rubber that appears more like a cartoon’s idea of a deformity than anything seen on a real burn victim. His suit is split in a similar fashion; formal and proper on one side and gaudy and colorful on the other. When we see his evil lair later in the film the interior decoration keeps to this pattern. One side looks like the very throne room of hell and the other is pure white and fit for a fairy tea party. His two sexy girlfriends, Sugar and Spice (Drew Barrymore and Debi Mazar) are bedecked to match.
When Batman arrives at the bank robbery, he is joined by Commissioner Gordon (Pat Hingle) and Dr. Chase Meridian (Nicole Kidman). Meridian is a professional parapsychologist who specializes in super-criminals and caped crusaders alike. She doesn’t look much like a psychologist. She stands next to Batman looking like a blonde bombshell, speaking in silky tones and saying nothing more insightful than what can be gleaned from a copy of Psychology Today. She is about as convincing a psychologist as Denise Richards was as a physicist in The World Is Not Enough. Kidman plays the role like a Bond girl. She feigns a professional interest in Batman that masks something more fetishistic.
We later see a love triangle develop between her, Batman, and his secret identity Bruce Wayne. The movie posits a theme where Dr. Meridian’s infatuation with Batman is something girlish and rebellious; her eventual favoring of Wayne being a moment of maturity. She directs her husky-toned flirtations toward both equally, however, and the point is not hammered home that deeply.

After Two-Face escapes he joins forces with The Riddler (Jim Carrey) whose wild performance is the front and center of the whole show. Carrey plays Riddler with no restraint at all. His acting reaches over the top and then goes only higher. He moves like he is cursed to dance forever and he never stops talking. The performance is loud and obnoxious; Carrey mugs the camera, making bizarre faces and dropping pop culture references and bizarre jokes whenever he is on screen, which ends up being a great deal. Jim Carrey has this way of punctuating his words with sharp turns of his head. He does it so much you could make a drinking game out of it. After Batman Forever I’d be fairly plastered. Try doing it while watching The Mask and you would need a new liver.
When we first meet him he is an excitable and neurotic employee of Wayne Enterprises named Edward Nygma who idolizes Bruce Wayne and wants to impress him with a new mind-control device he invented. Wayne’s predictable rejection crushes the already unhinged Nygma’s spirit and he becomes enraged and bitter. It’s probably the lamest super-villain origin story to date, but it fits the material Schumacher presents.
As Riddler he uses his mind control device to read the minds of everyone in Gotham so he can steal their credit card numbers and financial records. It’s a shockingly short-sighted plot. One man having access to everyone’s money would only crash the economy and more than likely the existence of his machine would force the world to adapt its methods of bookkeeping to counter-act it. But maybe I am overthinking the logistics of a villain scheme obviously reminiscent of a Saturday morning cartoon.

When the movie sticks to Joel Schumacher’s vision it works remarkably well even if Carrey could afford to tone it down a little. Gotham looks better than ever keeping the same Gothic Dr. Seussian aesthetic from before, but more lively and animated. The camera rides through the city like a roller-coaster, allowing the viewer to soak in the details. It reminds me of a professional haunted house made with money as no object.
Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey’s antics are constantly energetic and off the wall. Reminding myself that this is supposed to be a live-action cartoon I can accept them, if not love them overmuch.
Where it fails is with its hero characters. Pat Hingle phones in his performance as Gordon, seeming to be painfully aware of what had become of the series. Kilmer is dry as a bone and O’Donnell is over-serious and undercooked as a character. Nicole Kidman brings to the movie the sort of character we should have had in Catwoman back in Batman Returns. Bond girls and Batman vixens alike are supposed to be somewhat innocent and prepubescent in their sensuality. They entice the man hidden behind the mask, but the boy that the mask represents ultimately wins out and keeps them untouchable. Kidman brings this to Chase Meridian well enough, but still never quite reaches the comic tone that the movie needs more of.

In Batman Forever Schumacher tries too hard to meld the 1960s era camp with the more mature themes of the Burton movies, and the result is an inconsistent mess. In the end I appreciated what the director has tried to do more than what he has done.

Director: Joel Schumacher
Writers: Bob Kane, Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchler, Akiva Goldsman
Cast: Val Kilmer (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Tommy Lee Jones (Two-Face/Harvey Dent), Jim Carret (Edward Nygma/Riddler), Nicole Kidman (Dr. Chase Meridian), Chris O’Donnell (Dick Grayson/Robin), Michael Gough (Alfred Pennyworth), Pat Hingle (Commissioner Gordon), Drew Barrymore (Sugar) Debi Mazar (Spice)
Producers: Tim Burton, Mitchell E. Dauterive, Peter Macgregor-Scott, Benjamin Melniker, Kevin J. Messick, Michael E. Uslan
Composer: Elliot Goldenthal
Cinematographer: Stephen Goldblatt
Editors: Mark Stevens, Dennis Virkler

Batman Returns (1992)

1.5/4 stars

Batman Returns is an ugly, unpleasant, and meanspirited film. There is something sick beneath its surface of gross-out grotesquerie, bondage-inspired sensuality, and gratuitous violence. Watching it, I felt there must have been a lot of anger behind its making. It’s the sort of movie that after viewing it I wanted to ask the filmmakers, “Who hurt you?”

Taking place a few years after the much superior Batman (1989), the film sees the Caped Crusader springing back into action after a group of rogue circus performers kidnap industrialist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) during a public ceremony. He is blackmailed by the sewer-dwelling Penguin (Danny DeVito) who knows of Shreck’s illegal toxic waste dumping. Unlike the more balanced previous movie, the villains in Batman Returns take center stage leaving Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) more time to brood in front of his TV, I guess. The Penguin, far removed from the boyish aristocratic charm of Burgess Meredith, is a repulsive figure. He waddles in disgusting soiled long underwear, chows on raw fish with ill-manners that Gollum would have objected to, and lecherously leers at any woman he meets. His pasty, balding, hook-nosed visage only further elicits disgust in the viewer. In one of the films most disgusting scenes he chews on a raw fish, flesh dribbling from his mouth, right before biting a man on the nose causing it to gush blood. He then turns his attention to a female assistant and confides in Shreck his sexual fantasies featuring her. He flaps his deformed hands saying he wants to show her his “French flipper trick.” The scene’s comic tone only accentuates the rotten spirit that could have gone into writing it.
Added to the new rogues’ gallery is Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) who starts out as a mistreated assistant to Max Shreck who pushes her out of a window when she discovers too much about his illegal activities. As Selina Kyle, Catwoman’s alter ego, she is a depressing figure. Selina is a misogynistic caricature of a sexually frustrated working woman living in a man’s world. The attempted murder causes her to snap and she returns to her apartment smashes it to bits and then makes herself a shiny black catsuit. As one does.
The character transformation is sudden and without much explanation. She adopts a sultry voice saying to herself, “Now I feel a lot yummier.” Her performance is sexually charged and out of place in a film made to cater to kids. When she allies herself with the Penguin he continually bombards her with unwanted sexual attention, his language vulgar and graphic. The game she plays with him is one of flirtation, innuendo, and rebuff (in that order). Her action scenes play out like a dance where suggestive comments contextualize a connection between sex and fighting. This sort of thing has been done before, but its application here in a movie for young people is disturbing. Catwoman as an archetype has always represented something prepubescent. She represents the growing confused feelings in young boys still overcoming their “girls are icky” phase. But that element is not here. In Batman Returns Catwoman fully embraces a dominatrix persona rife with explicit sexual dialogue. Every time she defeats a male opponent in a fight I kept waiting for them to take a quiet break for a cigarette.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Pfeiffer’s Catwoman is my favorite Catwoman. She encapsulates the seductiveness of the character and my reasons for favoring her are undeniably male ones. But the writing’s on the wall when put in the movie’s context. This movie is neither The Batman (2022) or The Dark Knight Rises. There is an offset of cartoonish comic book action and storytelling that makes her raw sensuality inappropriate. I have objections to her representation here in a kids movie as both a man and a father, if not so much as a male. To put it more succinctly, a movie that has been marketed with Happy Meal toys really ought not to have elements of BDSM and sexualized violence in its plot.
If I had any sympathy for the movie it was completely lost when we get to the part where Penguin murders a beauty queen. To frame Batman she is kidnapped and pushed off of a tall building with a flock of bats. The woman’s skimpy costume remains well-photographed throughout the ordeal and when she lands she is in surprisingly good shape, if still dead. There is something I find inherently sick about scantily clad women being killed on film that is especially egregious in a movie like this one.
Further adding to my distaste for the film is Penguin’s plot in the final act to kidnap Gotham’s firstborn and drown them in the toxic waste in his sewer. I had hoped that this would remain discussed and that the movie wouldn’t bother with scenes of scared screaming babies being loaded into cages, but alas, no dice; and the film goes there. Of course, Batman comes to the rescue and nothing horrible happens, but still…

This is among some of the most unpleasant superhero movies ever made. I wish I knew what Tim Burton (a very talented director) was going through when he made it. It is definitely the most Burton-esque of his Batman films. Danny Elfman’s score is highly reminiscent of the style heard in Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands and the same Dr. Seussian sense of model design under a winter blue color palette that characterizes Burton’s films is present here. His movies look a lot like the inside of a snow globe.
But, there is a lot of anger and resentment in the film’s writing. Any and every opportunity to be gross, exploitative, and crass is taken throughout. The Joel Schumacher Batman movies that followed are notoriously stupid in their idiotic writing and cartoonish visuals, but Schumacher never juxtaposed the lightweight content with half-naked women being murdered, bondage-geared dominatrices saying “Don’t be too rough with me it’s my first time” before a fight, or vile depictions of gross-out violence. The movie is rated PG-13, but much of the sexual dialogue is more fitting for an R-rated picture. The ugly tone and foul attitudes that fill every scene contains no meaningful commentary, but simply exist for their own sake.
It’s a film where sex is firmly connected to violence, Batman kills people, and the downtrodden and discarded poor folk are, we are told, monstrosities of nature. Batman Returns is the most hate-filled superhero flick ever made, and if I was not clear, I didn’t like it much.

Director: Tim Burton
Writers: Bob Kane, Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm
Cast: Michael Keaton (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Danny DeVito (Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin), Michelle Pfeiffer (Selina Kyle/Catwoman), Christopher Walken (Max Shreck), Michael Gough (Alfred), Michael Murphy (Mayor), Cristi Conaway (Ice Princess), Andrew Bryniarski (Chip), Pat Hingle (Commissioner Gordon)
Producers: Ian Bryce, Tim Burton, Denise Di Novi, Larry Franco, Peter Guber, Benjamin Melniker, Jon Peters, Michael E. Uslan
Composer: Danny Elfman
Cinematographer: Stefan Czapsky
Editors: Bob Badami, Chris Lebenzon

The Truman Show (1998)

4/4 stars

“Was any of it real?” Truman asks. His “creator” doesn’t provide a satisfactory answer and he is left to work out his reality on his own. This is not unfamiliar to the human experience and there is something relatable here that is starkly put in The Truman’s Show allegory.

Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) lives in the idyllic suburb of Seahaven, which, he is constantly reminded, is a nice place to live. It’s a place where everyone knows his name and everyone likes him. He has everything a man could want: a successful and comfy desk job, a best friend always equipped with an encouraging word, and a doting wife who smiles constantly as if she is posing for a Sears catalog. The only thing that keeps Truman from being perfectly happy is his wanderlust. While everything else continues to get handed to him his desire to travel and see the world remains unfulfilled. It is, in fact, largely discouraged by everyone; even his grade school teacher tells him incredibly that he is too late to become an explorer because “there is nothing left to explore.”
His fear of the ocean doesn’t help. After his father apparently drowns during a fishing trip his phobia of water is capitalized on by everyone who seems hellbent on keeping him from leaving or even thinking about it.

What Truman doesn’t know, but everyone else does, is that his life is carefully and painstakingly scripted. Everyone he meets are actors and the world of Seahaven is a massive TV film set with thousands of cameras running 24/7. Outside in the real world millions of viewers from around the world are watching The Truman Show, the ultimate in reality TV broadcasting. Truman’s life is the subject of constant analysis. He has no privacy and everything is being quietly manipulated behind the scenes by Christoph (Ed Harris) who is the creator of the Truman Show. Christoph is an artist of the avant-garde type who proudly claims that Truman is the first person to be legally adopted by a corporation.

Truman begins to suspect that his existence is being contrived by outside influences after a studio set lamp suddenly falls from the sky. One thing after another follows. His car radio mistakenly taps into a walkie-talkie feed that is describing all of his movements and later he finds a craft table behind an elevator surrounded by grips and cameramen before he is dragged away by security.
He is treated like he is being paranoid while everyone around him seems more and more obvious as performers. Christoph tells his critics that if Truman truly wanted to leave he could do so if his will was strong enough, but he quickly becomes aggressive in trying to stop Truman from leaving when this notion is tested. With the power of the weather and natural disasters at the push of a button Christoph is more than confident that Truman is going nowhere.

There is an indictment that can be found here in The Truman Show against the dehumanization that reality television offers. His many fans consider his humanity and feelings secondary to the soapish drama with which the show entertains them. To them he is a character in the same way that the Bachelor or the Real Housewives of where-the-hell-ever are characters. They and Christoph’s staff feel a cynical appreciation for dramatic gravitas. This is most keenly felt when the showrunners “kill off” Truman’s dad to boost ratings only to bring him back several seasons later with an unbelievable amnesia storyline. The manipulation is cruel and I had genuine feelings of anger provoked at the means in which these things are done to him. In one of the most disheartening moments Truman’s “best friend” Marlon (Noah Emmerich) tells him that he cares about him and that he would never lie to him. All of these lines are being fed to him by Christoph via an earpiece.
Truman is soon come to the realization that his “wife” doesn’t like him, his closest friends don’t care about him, and everyone he once trusted has only ever “loved” him from 9 to 5 for a paycheck.

Reality TV has only got worse since 1998 and in today’s day and age the satire has only become more poignant. But there is more than a satire of reality TV to be found here. Beneath that surface lay bigger questions about free will and the freedom to define oneself. When Christoph first reveals himself to Truman it is only after the fraud has been fully exposed and Truman is inches away from exiting Seahaven forever. Christoph’s voice booms godlike from the sky and he identifies himself as “the creator.” Whether Christoph believes in God himself is not made clear, but he clearly believes that there should be one if there isn’t. For Truman he has tried to take on the role himself, making what he believes to be a perfect existence for Truman to live in. Writer, Andrew Niccol seems to be someone who has grown up on claims that all trials are tests and are designed by God to direct us where we should go. In favor of human-directed destiny Truman rejects this to push back against the confined beliefs that had shaped his reality.

Truman, throughout the film, is full of questions, but it is his last, “Was any of it real?”, that is the most important. It’s difficult to say after so many lies and deceits, but what is clear is that, if nothing else, Truman himself was real. Every expression, every thought, and every affection from him was hundred percent real. And Truman deserves to be around people who are just as real. What Christoph offers in the final scene is not fulfillment, but stagnation.
Real life, independent and free, is uncertain and full of vagaries. But it is more rewarding. Happiness found in it is earned and pain is far from meaningless. What The Truman Show says is that a life needs some sense of meaning. It requires self-direction to be healthy. Should Truman remain in Seahaven, his life would be perfect, but it would not be happy. Nor would it be a life.

Fly Away Home (1995)

4/4 stars

I am of the mind that there is no genre incapable of producing something good. Take the eco-conscious-child-bonds-with-a-wild-animal genre for instance. They were a dime a dozen in the 80s and 90s and the majority of its examples were utter dreck. Often over-sentimental and preachy, these kinds of movies too frequently end up saccharine and lacking in genuine human feeling. They aren’t hard to find. You can find them in any family movie pack in 5 dollar bargain bins.
Carroll Ballard’s (The Black Stallion) Fly Away Home is an example of the genre being treated with dignity and honest sentiment. The film is an emotionally moving picture that is not a mere environmental sermon or a cute animal movie. While these elements are there, Fly Away Home is more about the human experience. At its core, the movie preaches finding purpose after things we take for granted are taken away. This is a movie that keeps relatable human concerns at the foreground, supported by its green message instead of the other way around.

Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) is a 13 year old girl who, when her mother is killed in a car accident, is sent to Ontario to live with her father, Thomas (Jeff Daniels). She has not seen him in ten years and their interactions are awkward at first as she coldly tries to adjust to the sudden change in her life. Thomas is a socially-unaccustomed sculptor and aviation enthusiast who throws himself into his work. While he tries his best to keep his daughter comfortable there is a lack of connection and neither one of them is quite able to grasp the pain that each of them carries.
The first inkling of their developing bond comes when Amy discovers that he is involved with a local dispute with a real estate developer that threatens the wildlife community. At first, she claims to not care, but this quickly changes when she discovers a nest of goose eggs while playing hooky from school. The birds’ mother was killed by a bulldozer and Amy realizes that without her help the chicks will likely die. She hides the eggs in a drawer, but they are discovered by her father and his girlfriend Susan (Dana Delany) when they hatch.
The geese have since imprinted on Amy and they follow her everywhere believing her to be their mother. Thomas allows her to keep them despite the difficulties involved. His reasons for doing so are not stated explicitly, but I felt that he realized in that moment that Amy was overwhelmed by the loss of her mother and felt a kinship with the chicks on this basis. Amy is trying to live vicariously through the memory of her dead mom by being a mother herself to the birds in a way her own mother can no longer do for her. A forced separation would do only more psychological damage, and Thomas understands this.
But, caring for the fast-growing geese is not without complications. Geese have a natural instinct to fly south when winter comes, but require parental guidance to learn in which direction to go. Without parents geese under Canadian law must be rendered flightless by having their wings clipped, an operation that Amy strongly objects to.
Thomas, his brother David (Terry Kinney), and his assistant Barry (Holter Graham) hatch a plan to use airplanes to teach the geese to fly and guide them to South Carolina to migrate. This is complicated by the fact that the birds will only follow Amy and so Thomas decides to teach his daughter to fly and operate an airplane so they can make the flight together. There is a forgivable plothole here because, of course, all that needs to be done is craft a two-seater with Amy as a passenger. The birds would still follow. Ignoring this issue and moving on, two one-seater planes are built, both of which are fashioned to look like large geese.

Their flight is the highlight of the latter act of the film, bringing a highly emotional payoff to Amy and Thomas’s relationship with Caleb Deschanel’s gorgeous cinematography on full display. The natural Canadian landscapes are gloriously autumnal, shot in wide angles. The beauty of nature and its importance are ever-present in every shot of Fly Away Home and the fight for its survival is deliberately paralleled by the emotional drives of its human characters.
Mark Isham’s beautiful film score adds a sense of sadness and newfound joys to the film’s mood, with a recurring song (10,000 Miles) performed by Mary Chapin Carpenter that sets the movie’s themes of overcoming loss and finding hope afterward.
The film is a spiritual experience in which Man and Nature are not enemies at war with one another, but rather companions that share in and reflect each other’s griefs and influences. Environmentally-minded movies like this one are often angry or else limp and uninspired in presenting their message. Fly Away Home is neither. It takes the subject of human grief and gives us a place where it can be uplifted to new purpose. It doesn’t deny the reality of pain, but finds meaning in it.

While many family movies are cynically dumb and bankrupt of emotional depth, Fly Away Home demonstrates that they don’t have to be. There are too many good wholesome family movies to allow statements like “well, it’s a kids’ movie” to justify dimwitted schlock. I would encourage any parent the next time it is family movie night, instead of tormenting themselves with something obnoxious, loud, and thoughtless, to put this on. Children deserve good movies too.