Butler's Cinema Scene

Finn Little and friend

“STORM BOY” My rating : C+

98 minutes | MPAA ratingL

Some children’s films — “The Black Stallion,” say, or “Fly Away Home” — are too good for children.  They entertain the small fry, sure, but they appeal to adults on an even deeper, more resonant level.

And then there are films like “The Storm Boy,” an Australian effort that should keeps the youngsters diverted but which felt too contrived and deliberately constructed to keep this mature viewer enthralled.

This is the second film adaptation of Australian novelist Colin Thiele’s 1963 best seller about a boy and his pet pelican, and for modern audiences screenwriter/star Jai Courtney has provided a rather unwieldy framing story that finds the child hero of the original now an older man looking back on his past as he faces a big decision.

In the present retired businessman Mike Kingley (Geoffrey Rush) is called back for a family powwow about what to do with a strip of beach that was Mike’s boyhood home. The real estate is now hugely valuable and  Mike’s son-in-law, the current head of the business, has plans that, well, aren’t particularly environmentally friendly.

Mike must wrestle with his conscience over how he’ll vote in a board-of-directors showdown; part of that process is relating to his sullen granddaughter (Morgana Davies) — who doesn’t share the rest of her family’s rape-the-earth attitude — the story of how he grew up on that scenic bit of coastline.

Morganna Davies, Geoffrey Rush

Flash back 65 years where young Mike aka “Storm Boy” (Finn Little) lives in glorious isolation in a rickety beach shack with his widowed father “Hideaway” Tom (screenwriter  Courtney).  Tom may be nursing some emotional problems, but he’s a protective parent and their hermit-like existence is ideal for a bright, animal-loving kid.

Storm Boy becomes a surrogate parent to three orphaned pelican chicks. One of the birds becomes so domesticated that it seems more canine than avian…at one point the film delivers a “Lassie, get help!” moment when the bird is instructed to fly out to sea to save Hideaway Tom from a killer storm.

Oh…and Storm Boy gets lots of native wisdom from an Aborigine man (Trevor Jamieson) who lives in the vicinity.

Director Shawn Seet is basically making two movies here — Mike’s present-day dilemma and his flashbacks to boyhood — and only the latter really works.

The childhood sequences have been beautifully photographed and the pelican — a combination of live-action bird work and computer-generated imagery — has been very well rendered.  Also, the film doesn’t go out of its way to give the bird a human personality…it’s still a bird.

But the bookend sequences with Rush feel forced and preachy…it’s like a soapbox oration about protecting the wild places.

| Robert W. Butler