This is a great pick for a family movie night, which it was for us last night. It has an unlikely premise (though apparently something close to it actually happened), but it is executed so well and with so much veracity that it ends up being very engaging.
The movie stars Anna Paquin as Amy, a 14 year old girl who has just lost her mother and has had to move from New Zealand to Ontario, Canada. The beginning of this transition proves to be very difficult for Amy, as would be expected. Her father (played very well by Jeff Daniels), is a kooky inventor who at first seems completely unable to relate to his daughter at all. This is made more difficult by his involvement with another woman (Dana Delany), and an overall lack of ability to relate to Amy in her time of loss. As Amy moves into the house, her father is trying to ward off a developer who is seeking to use part of his land for a new real estate venture. One morning, a person with ties to the developer begins to tear up the land, and Amy's dad shows his true colors by bolting from his bed nearly naked to go into his yard to scream at the man driving the tractor. In the wake of this destruction, Amy finds the nest of a mother goose who had been killed by the developer. She saves the eggs, watches them hatch, and becomes the mother goose to the goslings. Her connection to the brood is so intense that she violently lashes out at a gaming official who attempts to curb Amy's efforts in taking care of the geese. When the reality strikes the whole family that the geese must migrate south to North Carolina to survive, the broken little family concocts a way to show the geese a way home. This project provides a needed connection between father and daughter, and it serves as a way for Amy to move forward in her grief, all the while deeply missing her mother.
As is the case with so many profound fables, death is the motivating force behind this whole story. So many wonderful stories and fables are only profound due to deep grief. Whether it's Harry Potter to Star Wars to Cinderella, death is at the heart of deeply human and true stories. The depth of grief in Amy is the engine which makes this story go forward. Anna Paquin realizes this grief in the character of Amy very well, and every moment she is on screen we know the depth of the experience of the character she is playing. As we live this experience with her, we are forced to walk in her shoes. We are made to imagine how we would feel if we lost our parent at a young age, and then we are made to move our life and school at the vulnerable age of 14. It is with this back drop that the devotion she shows to the geese makes any sense at all. Her father also is able to find a bridge to a daughter who was already distant, but is dealing with the added resentment of changing her whole life in the middle of such a trauma. Ironically, the quirkiness which at the beginning causes a rift between the father and daughter serves to end up rebuilding their relationship, as his talent with air crafts and inventing finds them a way to show the geese a way home.
I truly love finding movies like this. They are special fantasies that give parents a way to relate to our children by sharing a meaningful story. All three of my kids were engaged for the nearly two hours of this movie (with four years difference between my oldest and youngest, this is no ordinary feat). The longer I live, the more I see that broken lives truly do lead to wonderful stories. As we who are broken pick up the pieces of our lives, sometimes the reformed pieces can make something beautiful.
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