Fly Away Home **** (1996, Anna Paquin, Jeff Daniels, Dana Delany) – Classic Movie Review 2812

Director Carroll Ballard’s delightful 1996 children’s adventure film is based on the autobiography of Bill Lishman.

A 13-year-old girl’s mother dies in a car crash in New Zealand and the lass called Amy Alden (Anna Paquin) is sent to live with her solitary dad Tom (Jeff Daniels) in the wilds of Canada.

Uneasy with her dad and his girlfriend Susan Barnes (Dana Delany), she wanders around grieving and bored till one day she finds a nest of orphaned goose eggs, which she brings home and raises in a makeshift incubator. She is inspired to teach them to fly and show them how to migrate south to their winter home in North Carolina.

This entertaining and thought-provoking tale is exquisitely filmed by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel and expertly acted by Paquin and Daniels. Paquin gives her role a complex spin as she matures from the introverted girl at the movie’s start to the bright, determined young heroine of the piece, inspired by the new life she finds in Canada, embodied by her downy chums. Daniels makes her puzzled New Man dad sympathetic, achieving a difficult, wimpy role with style and grace.

It is based on the true story of Bill Lishman’s and Joseph Duff’s experiments on migrating birds. They provided ‘imprinted’ birds for the film as well as the aircraft.

The two stars reunited for The Squid and the Whale (2005), where Paquin was Daniels’s love interest. Daniels says about their intimate scenes in 2005: ‘We tried not to think about…you know, geese.’

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2812

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