Ray Pride

There's a certain kind of precociousness that just makes you want to smack a child actor: think of the freakshow mug of virtually any gleaming-eyed TV sitcom runt dragged up by ever-desperate SoCal casting directors.

But movies. Children in movies. From Ana Torrent in Victor Erice's 1973 childhood fever dream "The Spirit of the Beehive" to Jodie Foster in "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore"; Anna Paquin skipping along a cloud-and-surf-clotted beach; Haley Joel Osment pursing his lips and squinting his eyes at dead pacing; any Culkin before that Culkin begins to shave. It's freakish, prehensile magnetism, beyond untimely sexualization or culturally decadent objectification. While filmmakers and audiences also participate in a dance of metaphor about innocence and adolescent fear and fearlessness, the radiant gift of the best non-adult actors is presence, pure and simple.

There are a few movies this summer with startling performances by magnetic young performers: Evan Rachel Wood as a teen darker than her eye shadow in the sustained rant of "Thirteen"; Ludivine Sagnier as a fantasy of youth's relentless concupiscence in "Swimming Pool." And then there's Keisha Castle-Hughes, the center and soul of New Zealander Niki Caro's earnest "Whale Rider."

Audiences love it. At film festivals in North America and Europe, "Whale Rider" has racked up a number of audience-favorite awards. Sadly, I wish this were the full-blooded, full-bodied film it wants to be.

What are the elements? There's Maori surface, magnificent sea and sky, those massive sea mammals seen in visions that later come to pass, and the presence of Castle-Hughes, who holds her own against nature, the script and an overexcited Lisa Gerrard score that shames her earlier work with Dead Can Dance and director Michael Mann. Almost by herself, the charming young Castle-Hughes could keep "Whale Rider" from descending into decorous ethno-porn.

Drawn from a novel by award-winning Maori author Witi Ihimaera, Caro's crowd-pleaser is a present-day recasting of a centuries-old legend held by villagers along the glibly picturesque east coast of New Zealand. (Just point a camera: it would take strenuous effort to make this landscape unlovely.) The leader of the Ngati Konohi is always to be the eldest son, but in Ihimaera's appropriation, the eldest son dies at birth, leaving a twin sister, named Paikea, after the tribe's ancestor who is held to have arrived in the village on the back of a whale after his canoe capsized. ("Paikea," wouldn't you know, translates as "whale.") Enter angry, gimp-hipped, gray-cropped granddad Koro (Rawiri Paratene), who shortens the girl's name to "Pai" to sidestep sacrilege. Cut to the present. Now Pai is 12, coveting the acceptance of the humorless pisspot of a grandpa whom raised her, and dreaming of restoring the lineage.

"Whale Rider" is not dishonorable or dislikable, just disappointingly by-the-numbers. Despite a consistent compositional style of slightly acute angles across a widescreen frame, the pacing and cutting are mysteriously lugubrious and inert. While Caro seems to believe that grave equals gravity, and that an incantation in a language we cannot understand is necessarily profound, Castle-Hughes is the kind of young performer who embodies and conveys with the crushing bravura of her personality all the stuff that the rickety storytelling flubs. Pai chanting into the night air to conjure the whale should be, in concept, the most riveting girl-and-her-pony story ever. But there is some intangible mix of elements that Caro misses, whether moving toward a more estheticized looney-tunes aquatic mix like Denis Villeneuve's outrageous, emotionally scatty "Maelström," the drenching emotion of Jane Campion in a movie like "The Piano" or the more precise psychological conflicts and how they are visualized in fellow New Zealander Christine Jeff's "Rain," another female adolescent coming-of-age tapestry. But that precision, or Campion's delirium, is likely too specific for the audiences who will embrace "Whale Rider."

Koro opens a traditional school and educates the boys in the ways of chiefdom, but sends Pai on her way. He needs to find a prophet among the clueless males. "Somebody who's going to lead our people out of the darkness and who'll make everything all right again. The only problem is, you can't just decide who those people are just because you want them to be, eh?" But can you choose yourself to be a messiah? Another undercurrent swimming in this busy sea: Pai's got the gift: she looks to the water and realizes there's a CGI-cartooned version of her destiny plowing beneath those pretty currents.

At the end, the whales have flung themselves onto the beach. The villagers urge them back into the sea. The largest, eldest beast remains beached. In a simple image that may be the film's most beautiful, the villagers retreat right across the beach in long shot. Pai's small figure moves left, solitary, toward the expiring deity. She speaks to it. She runs her hand along its rough hide. It stirs; she's misted by its spout. Barefoot, she scales it. Cue de rigeur slow motion as she rides into the sea atop her god, toward life and life-affirming myth. Again, Caro fails at making the sequence transcendent by using slow-motion step-printing, unattractive zooms, and again, a superfluous ocean of that ghastly music. It's beauty to drown in, and Caro takes the plunge.

"Whale Rider" opens Friday.

(2003-06-18)

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