FLY AWAY HOME (48)

Directed by: Carroll Ballard

Starring: Anna Paquin, Jeff Daniels

The Pitch: A young girl and her eccentric inventor father adopt a flock of orphan geese - and, when winter comes, must guide them on their annual migration hundreds of miles south.

Theo Sez: If this were a person it would be some benign, ageing hippy: so laid-back you occasionally feel like shaking it awake, it's also a film with a message - a militant environmentalism that briefly threatens to overwhelm the climax (almost losing its most endearing element - that these folks are risking life and limb not to win money or a race (or to strike a blow for some cause) but to help a gaggle of dumb geese). Fortunately the film is too understated to become a message movie - it has some of the magical reserve of this director's masterpiece, THE BLACK STALLION, a certain quality of emotional tactfulness (as when, early on, we dissolve immediately to another scene as soon as the young heroine realises that her mother is dead), not least in the film's look, a quietly graceful palette of browns, faded greens and occasional burnished golds. As in THE BLACK STALLION, there are no villains here - the only enemies are Ordinances and Regulations, the weapons of government-imposed conformity (the film is positively Thoreau-like in its opposition to official authority); yet it doesn't have the earlier movie's wondrousness, perhaps because we can feel that it's soft-pedalling occasionally (as with the lame bird - "Igor" - whose highly dubious future is never hinted at). Ballard is a sort of kidfilm Bresson, stripping away at the inessential, which is why his films demand absolute rigour. Once we start to suspect that his austere style conceals anything banal or sentimental, austerity starts to look remarkably like blandness.