Ouch. this is rough
“Nell” plays like the ungainly love child of “E.T.” and director Michael Apted’s “Gorillas in the Mist”. It features a feral Jodie Foster and Liam Neeson getting to play the selflessness of “Schindler’s List’s” last scene over and over again for an entire film. I kinda forgot hollywood used to make movies this cheesy, one’s so bafflingly awkward in their messaging that it would be offensive if they already weren’t so funny.
Foster’s Nell is a North Carolina mountain woman, one raised her whole life in a cabin in the woods by a mother known as the town hermit.With the mother deceased, Nell is soon discovered for the first time. In her first appearance, the “wild child” lets loose like a frightened animal, kicking and shrieking until everyone she doesn’t know is forced to leave the cabin, all wondering who she even is and what to do about her.
Nell speaks in a kind of gutteral baby voice with not so much English as with her own speech distortion. She’s like a wild animal, untamed and swaying this way and that, often giving wild gestures or something that looks like interpretative dance-pray, or maybe its acting like a wolf. Who knows!
This is enough to fascinate town doctor Jerry Lovell (Neeson) and research psychologist Paula Olsen (Natasha Richardson). She wants to lock Nell up in order to be studied and rehabilitated while Dr. Jerry believes Nell is exactly where she should be and should be studied in the habitat in which she is accustomed too.
Dr. Jerry ends up winning out and so he watches Nell from afar, bothering to pick up on her language which leads to numerous annoying scenes with both Neeson and Foster saying words like “chickaday” to each other back and forth like it means something. Occasionally he speaks English to her, for what reason I don’t know. She never picks up any of it.
Dr. Olsen meanwhile also plans on studying Nell and her department is apparently so well off that they give her a houseboat to live in in a lake just away from Nell’s cabin. And if you’re impressed by that, she’s also managed to get all sorts of high tech surveillance cameras into Nell’s home without her even knowing it. Right!
They are able to study Nell’s body language and in one creepy scene, they realize that Nell once had a sister. There is also Nell After Dark, which is where she sheds her clothes for night swimming.
Among the things hard to understand is 1. How did a woman whose mother was a normally functioning human being have a daughter become this animalistic. 2 Why does Neeson think it a good idea to swim naked with her after realizing she’s a product of rape. And 3. What is Nell’s mental age? Should she be reading books like “The Art of Sensual Loving?”
Predictably, this does the trick of bringing the two doctors together and allowing the child-like, free-spirit Nell to encourage their courtship. Richardson is, of course, the sad, lonely careerist and Neeson is the gruff, stubborn protector. They both become like mommy and daddy, or two friends who really need to get laid, or whatever.
It’s all meant as a big showcase for Foster, who is never not doing her interpretative dance, or scrunching up her face, or doing ever more gutteral vocal work and moaning. It’s a performance of impressive (the annoying) physicality but its hindrance is that the film loses track of how she feels. Instead, every other character just projects on to her.
This all leads to a big finale where Nell is brought to town for the first time and we see the cruelty of the town’s people. Neeson and Richardson all help her in a series of escapes, first from the press, then from the asylum. Then there’s the big courtroom scene where Nell, still talking gibberish, preaches to everyone there about how they’re living their lives wrong, as they sit and look at her spellbound.
Apted makes nice use of the North Carolina mountainside but as this movie edges closer and closer to Saint Nell territory, it starts to get more and more tedious. You admire the effort from Foster, but not much about the movie.