Word: nell
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...Nell Marie...
Cross-border strains are rare here. The Mexicali Cineplex offers a choice among Nell, Speechless, Junior and Disclosure. At the border checkpoint, housewives flood through turnstiles heading for Calexico's Wal-Mart. Calexico's mayor is Mexican American, as are most residents. Even on the university campus in Mexicali, says student-body president Pedro Ariel Mendivil, anti-American slogans are virtually unheard of. ``That's old-fashioned politics,'' he says, adding that he hopes to earn a master's degree in the U.S. to gain foreign experience. He will not emigrate, however: ``I love Mexico passionately. We have...
Jodie Foster gives a fierce performance in Nell...
...Oscar night they all may be applauding Foster. In Nell the two-time winner (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs) plays a North Carolina woodswoman who has grown up utterly isolated from the outside world. Now her only companion, her mother, has died, and Nell is a rich woman -- but still barely a girl. She speaks her own dialect, recoiling from the doctor (Liam Neeson) and the psychologist (Natasha Richardson) who would help her, use her, perhaps destroy her, and who will be forever touched by her innocent sorcery...
Already you hear echoes of Foster's own Little Man Tate, as well as E.T., The Miracle Worker, The Wild Child, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Forrest Gump and Green Mansions (the last with Audrey Hepburn memorably miscast as Rima the Bird Girl). Nell is a fable of emergence and transcendence. Written by William Nicholson and Mark Handley, from Handley's play Idioglossia, it illustrates the familiar movie moral that wounded creatures are powerful ones, with powerful lessons to teach those who would presume to educate them. It's humanism at its most Panglossian. But Michael Apted...