Artistry Overcomes Farfetched Plot In ‘Fly Away’

In the two films for which he’s probably best known, 1979’s “The Black Stallion” and 1992’s “Wind,” director Carroll Ballard displays as much visual acuity as he does lack of story sense.

But Ballard is hardly another of the style-over-substance drones Hollywood seems to churn out by the dozen. A former camera operator on “Star Wars,” he knows how to frame a shot. He can also light a scene, transition smoothly from one moment (and mood) to the next and - from Mickey Rooney to Jeff Daniels, Jennifer Grey to Anna Paquin - work well with actors.

It’s just that the stories he chooses to film are so - well, they tend to be juvenile in both theme and scope.

That limitation seriously hurt “Wind,” Ballard’s attempt to take an adult look at America’s Cup racing. On an only slightly better scale, it relegated “Black Stallion” to the precious category of children’s fare.

You can almost hear the condescension now: “Yes, Ballard’s good - for a kiddie-movie director.”

Some of those same reactions are bound to be applied to his latest film, “Fly Away Home.” Ostensibly inspired by a true story, it involves a young woman named Amy (Paquin) who, following the death of her mother in New Zealand, goes to live with her father, Thomas, (Daniels) in Ontario.

The New Zealand part may have been written in to cover Paquin’s accent. Whatever, it does serve to explain why Daniels hasn’t seen his daughter since the breakup of the marriage many years before.

That separation is only one of the problems facing the father-daughter duo. Both, of course, are mourning the loss of the family’s third member. But even that pales in face of the fact that Amy has been wrenched from the only life she knows and forced to live with a volatile man whose penchant for hang-gliding is matched by his tendency to raise his voice at anyone who disagrees with him.

These two people hardly know each other anymore. What’s worse, only he seems to care. She is too busy mourning in a familiarly sullen, all-too-adolescent way - and resenting her father’s new love interest (Dana Delany).

Then comes the film’s McGuffin: a flock of goose eggs that somehow have survived the devastation of a local wildlife habitat. Amy stumbles onto them and decides to hatch the goslings and adopt them.

Trouble arises when a local wildlife agent informs Amy and Thomas of an ordinance that seeks to protect the birds from their own natural instincts to migrate. He suggests “pinioning” them, which is a horrid-sounding term for clipping their wings.

But Amy and her father, each for their own reasons, decide instead to do something wildly and imaginatively implausible: to take the birds south.

The geese, you see, will follow Amy everywhere. So Thomas teaches her how to fly, and the two of them take off for a wildlife sanctuary 500 miles to the south.

Up to this point, “Fly Away Home” has been a fairly realistic coming-together saga. The characters are adequately complicated, especially Paquin’s Amy, who is as bad-tempered as Daniels’ Thomas is self-centered.

When they take to the air, however, matters get more than a little farfetched, to include fracases with the U.S. Air Force, duck hunters and high buildings, faulty equipment and another developer (the sentiments here are purely on the side of nature) who wants to bulldoze the birds’ proposed new home.

Throughout this PG-rated adventure drama, Ballard works hard to make his film something more than, say, the latest Disney movie of the week. Riding the skill of cinematographer Caleb Deschanel, Ballard comes up with images that make the movie screen one large landscape painting.

And as ridiculous as its plot may get (an “inspired by” story does tend to bend the facts a bit), “Fly Away Home” never loses sight of the father-daughter relationship that spawned it.

This is one time that the rating PG also means “Pretty Good.”

, DataTimes MEMO: These sidebars appeared with the story: “FLY AWAY HOME” Location: Est Sprague, Newport and Showboat cinemas Credits: Directed by Carroll Ballard, starring Anna Paquin, Jeff Daniels, Dana Delany, Terry Kinney, Holter Graham, Jeremy Ratchford and Deborah Verginella Running time: 1:50 Rating: PG

OTHER VIEWS Here’s what other critics say about “Fly Away Home:” Michael H. Price/Fort Worth Star-Telegram: A first-rate movie for the be-kind-to-animals crowd, Carroll Ballard’s “Fly Away Home” may be the best film of its sort since “The Black Stallion.” Duane Byrge/The Hollywood Reporter: Uplifting yet speckled with a flinty perspective on life, “Fly Away Home” is a terrific PG family film, one that will appeal to grown-ups as well as kids.