Nell. - movie reviews

National Review, Feb 6, 1995 by John Simon

IT WOULD be hard to find a more self-serving, fatuous, and totally useless film than Nell, co-produced by its star, Jodie Foster, as the ultimate ego trip. It deals with a young girl, Nell, who grows up in the Carolina wilderness. The only language she speaks is something private and incomprehensible she has derived from the speech of her mother. (Being illegitimate, she had no father around. This mother had had a stroke, and spoke a kind of gibberish--rather like that mumbled after a stroke by Sir Anthony Hopkins in Legends of the Fall, which, along with Mixed Nuts, is one of the two foulest of the current crop of movies.

The genesis of Nell was this: "In 1989, producer Renee Missel [Miss Foster's partner] saw a Los Angeles production of a play entitled Idioglossia, written by Mark Handley, and fell in love with its lead character, the beautiful and mysterious Nell." This sentence from the press kit tells it all. I have no access to the original play, but I think I can reconstruct it from the distorting mirror of what has now been Fosterized into Nell, quite a leap from Idioglossia, which, of course, would spell instant death on the marquee and at the box office.

I would guess that the play concerned the efforts of a dedicated doctor to unscramble the idiolect of a wild child, and, by teaching her regular speech, save her from growing up absurb.

Mr. Simon is NR's film critic. Idioglossia is defined by the OED as "a form of dyslalia in which the person affected consistently makes substitutions in his speech sounds to such an extent that he seems to speak a language of his own." (In case "dyslalia" is a problem, it means "derangement or impediment of speech." I shouldn't be surprised if this was in fact a two-character play, somewhat on the order of The Miracle Worker, but language therapy in an age without unified language wouldn't play at your neighborhood Loew's or Cineplex. The movie, co-scripted by Mr. Handley and William Nicholson, doubtless to the specifications of its star, does indeed include dyslalia and its treatment by the enlightened country doctor, played by Liam Neeson, but only as wrapped in much other stuff and fluff.

First, there is the glorification of Miss Foster. She gets to play the heroine as a teenager ("My, Jodie, how young you look!"), as a savage child of nature ("My, Jodie, what an adorably puckish free spirit you are!"), as a beautiful nymph swimming merrily in the nude ("My, Jodie, what a terrific, youthful body you have!"), as an innocent who has to be shown what the male body looks like by having Neeson strip in front of her ("My, Jodie, how generously you share that gorgeous hunk with the rest of us!"), and still letting Mr. Neeson have an affair with and eventually marry the second-lead female, played by Natasha Richardson, his real-life spouse ("My, Jodie, how selflessly you allow the hunk to marry someone more suitable in the end!"), with the couple all but adopting Nell into the bosom of their growing family as a Foster child.

Several things, to use a linguistic trope, do not parse here. Nell's mother's corpse is discovered by a delivery boy bringing groceries to the isolated cottage in the woods where mom lived the hermit's life with the wild love child she hid from the civilized world. But do hermits usually dwell within range of bicycling delivery boys? We need this boy so that he can become, first, one of a couple of gapers spying on Nell bathing in the nude (Susanna and the Juniors?), and later, when she is brought into town and wanders into a pool hall, for a dramatic near-rape scene at the hands of these boys and their fellow lounge lizards, with Neeson coming to the last-moment rescue. Having played a rape victim in The Accused, Miss Foster knows that rape sells a lot better than dyslalia.

But let us not sell dyslalia short. The handicapped--or, more politically correctly, the otherwise enabled--are hot commodities these days. Especially those handicapped in speech in these times when Standard English is considered a needless affront to practitioners of street English, black English, or bilingualism (i.e., Spanish). So the movie ends with an epilogue captioned Five Years Later," in which Mr. Neeson and Miss Richardson come back to visit the more or less cured Miss Foster--it is not quite clear how well she has mastered Standard English--and she takes their eldest daughter out to the lake where she herself used to swim mother-neckid (and, for aught we know, still does, since she chooses to live on in that, to be sure very accessible, wilderness) and teaches her the same nonsense ditty she herself sang in her pre-Neeson days, an ending that can be read as the apotheosis of bilingualism.

The Michael Apted movie is well shot in gorgeous locations by Dante Spinotti, but the most interesting thing about it is that its co-scenarist was William Nicholson, best known as writer of both the play and film versions of Shadowlands. The hero of that is the same C. S. Lewis who in his book Studies in Words warned about verbicide, the murder of correct language--the very thing Nell is rather equivocal about. It was made by Miss Foster's production company, Egg Pictures, and it certainly has laid a big one.