Yet another film made in New Zealand but Whale Rider is to Scarfies what Airplane is to Scary Movie 3. In this movie based on Witi Ihimaera’s novel, we get an honest emotional trip by a young woman who refuses to accept the place in life others want to assign her. Kind of resonates with my recent reading of The Secret Life of Bees.
The movie begins with a tragedy, the mother and one of a pair of twins, a boy, die as she gives birth; though the other twin, a girl, is healthy and lives, the father is driven away and the grandfather is shaken to his core. Whale Rider is set in a Maori village in New Zealand and the grandfather (Rawiri Paratene) is the tribal chief. According to tradition, the firstborn son must succeed him as chief but after his wife’s death, the son (Cliff Curtis) leaves the village, his daughter and future behind to become an artist in Germany. The grandparents raise Pai, their granddaughter, but the tradition-bound old man cannot bring himself to allow her a place mandated by present-day mores. Instead he goes so far as to re-open a school to teach the village teenage boys enough so they may participate in a contest to find the new chief.
But Pai will not go along, hanging around outside the school, practicing mostly on her own, sneaking help from her uncle at times, and all along simply looking for the normal approval any child wants from the man who raised her. Keisha Castle-Hughes won a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her effort; while she lost that to Charlize Theron, I can see why she was shortlisted–Castle-Hughes did win the New Zealand version of the award as well as numerous others–and look forward to seeing her in Star Wars Episode III (even if I end up waiting to see that on TV).
Niki Caro did an excellent job of adapting the novel into a screenplay and directing the film. People in America generally look at the landscapes of New Zealand and break into excited words, which Caro uses a bit here, but more than that she connects the characters to their territory visually. The dialog does well by avoiding overt sentimentality as would be all too easy in scenes such as when Pai’s father returns for a brief visit or when her grandfather is let down by the young boys.
definitely recommended, this is not a chick flick
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