"Nell" doesn't jell.
Earnest and well-intentioned, the film never quite breaks through a membrane into believability, and hence into empathy. Its very texture, so Hollywood-pat and overcrowded with professional beauty, exquisite cinematography and the best production values money can buy, works against the raw nature of its materials and the authenticity of its emotion.
Jodie Foster's Nell is a subset of wild-child fantasies. Not exactly raised by wolves or bears, she was nevertheless isolated from civilization in the North Carolina backwoods by a mother who herself had suffered both male violence (rape) and several strokes that led to vocal distortions. Thus Nell, in her 20s, has apparently never heard a "normal" human voice, though, mysteriously, she's mastered some secret language unknown to science.
Nell is "discovered" -- she never knew she was lost -- upon the death of her mother, after a delivery boy hears her keening in the woods. He calls the sheriff, who ultimately calls the local doctor, hulking, sensitive Liam Neeson. He in turns calls (call-call-call-call is the dramatic method of the movie) in some academic shrinks, including Natasha Richardson.
The issue is: What's to be done with Nell? Beautiful, angelic, sweet and completely unsocialized, she's certainly unfit to be dumped in the modern world, which will, the doctors realize, gobble her up once it notices her. At the same time, it's cruel to institutionalize her. Having known only freedom, she would experience clinical incarceration as death; and in no way can she be considered retarded or dysfunctional.
This is an extremely interesting philosophical and moral conflict, and the movie goes to great lengths to set it up. All power and respect to Foster, the executive producer, for sponsoring a movie that is about ideas, not marketing concepts. If to save something you have to destroy it, what's the point of saving it? On the other hand, if you don't save it, have you acted irresponsibly?
The dilemma is further driven by Foster's own almost affectless performance as Nell, an act of performing courage only rarely rivaled in films (by, say, Debra Winger in "A Dangerous Woman"). Foster's Nell is beyond acting: She's just pure movement and sound and has this utterly open way to her, as defenseless as a newborn. Even her sexuality is completely innocent. She has no body shame and affixes no meaning to various parts of her body.
But in the very concept lie the roots of the movie's ultimate inadequacy. Nell is so romantically imagined that she hardly seems of this world, much less of North Carolina.
She's like the White Rock fairy, a delicate ethereal creature with gossamer wings contemplating her own dainty reflection on the surface of a sylvan pond. Dirt refuses to stick to her bare toes or lodge under her nails; her hair is as radiant as any Breck Girl's, almost as if a high-priced crew of hair mechanics was hovering out of camera range with a complete arsenal of industrial-strength hair-care products. Her teeth could have been designed by God for an angel.
This beauty fits into the movie uneasily and somehow subverts it. Worse still, it's a theme the movie continues with Neeson and Richardson, world-class lookers both. I mean, here, on the little backwoods puddle in North Carolina, we have three-fifths of the five most beautiful people in the world. You're thinking: This has got to be a movie.
It gets sadly movier. The medicos, under the supervision of a local judge, decide to watch Nell. What this means is that as strenuously as the film has labored to reach the point of stark intellectual conflict -- naturalism vs. society -- it's at this point that it becomes ridiculous. The plot paints the characters into an awkward corner from which they never quite emerge, and for the longest time, the movie chronicles the least likely research expedition ever.
It ends up with Neeson's moony Dr. Jerry Lovell peeping on Nell from a pup tent on a hill while Richardson's Dr. Paula Olsen peeps on her from a houseboat. They evolve into a twisted parody of a nuclear family, father, mother and daughter, but the script, by William Nicholson and Mark Handley, can't quite figure out what to do with them, except turn Nell into such an icon of innocence that she unites the two doctors.
Meanwhile, a stock villain has entered the story, the normally avuncular Richard Libertini as a smarmy psychology department head who sees in Nell a treasure of academic papers, grants and renown. To advance his own interests, he pressures Dr. Olsen into recommending that his university be given custodianship of Nell.
Thus the movie finds its own ludicrous finale in a trial scene that reaches the ultimate level of campiness when Nell rises to her own defense in Nellspeak, which is clumsily translated by Neeson into a plea for universal brotherhood. Like, who could be against that? For a movie that starts so smart, it ends up very dumb.
"Nell"
Starring Jodie Foster, Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson
Directed by Michael Apted
Released by Twentieth Century Fox
Rated R
** 1/2