IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
WHALE RIDER
Written and directed by Niki Caro
PG-13, 105 minutes
In the summer of 1986, when Maori writer Witi Ihimaera was serving in Manhattan as New Zealand's Consul General, an errant whale took a wrong turn and wandered up the Hudson River. It put Ihimaera in mind of an ancient legend from his home half a world away, about a chief who rode in from the sea on the back of a whale, and began the proud lineage of Whangara chiefs descending through the firstborn son. Inspired by his teenaged daughters, Ihimaera put a feminist spin on the old story, and wrote a best-selling novel, Whale Rider. "Having a girl ride the whale, which is also a symbol of patriarchy," says Ihimaera, "was my sneaky literary way of socking it to the guy thing."
Translated into a film by award-winning New Zealand director Niki Caro ("Memory & Desire"), it is a simply told, profoundly moving retelling of the legend of Paikea, the foam-borne ancestor of the Whangara. The wife of Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), the heir apparent to the chiefdom, dies giving birth to twins, a boy and a girl. The boy dies as well. The heartbroken Porourangi flees to Europe, leaving his daughter behind in the care of his parents. But first, to the outrage of his father Koro (Rawiri Paratene), Chief of the Whangara, he names the girl Paikea, the name that would have gone by tradition to the stillborn brother. "Everyone was waiting for the first-born boy to lead us," she says in a voice-over. "But he died, and I didn't."
Koro wants nothing to do with this granddaughter. But by the time she has grown to preadolescence, he's devoted to her. Still, on one point he will not budge. She is a girl, and not a consideration for chief. He shortens her name to Pai, and forbids her to participate in the instruction and competition for his successor that he institutes among the first-born boys of the community when it becomes clear that Porourangi is not going to give him another heir.
Pai (11-year-old Keisha Castle-Hughes) is a thoughtful, spunky kid, and not easily discouraged. She has the example in her grandmother, Nanny Flowers (Vicky Haughton), of a strong woman, but Nanny Flowers is strong within the Maori traditions of wife at least nominally subservient to her husband. Pai absorbs those traditions, but dreams beyond them. She has always been a student of Whangara custom and lore, taking in any scraps that her grandfather dispenses. Now she eavesdrops illicitly on the Sacred School of Learning of the Sacred Ways. She also studies combat with her uncle Rawiri (Grant Roa), who had the misfortune of being the second son.
The performances in "Whale Rider" are wonderful. Haughton plays the grandmother with steel in her jaw and anger snapping in her dark eyes at the slights and injustices that her granddaughter must endure for being a girl, though Nanny Flowers herself will go no further toward rebellion than muttering unconvincingly about divorce. Curtis, the most familiar face here from movies like "The Insider" and "Training Day", shows us Porourangi's deep need to be his own person even if it means going literally to the ends of the earth. Roa brings humor and layers of hidden strength to the brother Rawiri. And Paratene, who was hesitant at first to take on the role of Koro because he belongs to a different tribe of Maori, projects the tightly-wound, impenetrable adherence to tradition that makes him shut out voices of understanding and enlightenment from within himself and without. With his set face and stubborn attitudes Koro is as immovable as the wooden statuary that records Whangara tradition.
But it is the young film novice Keisha Castle-Hughes who commands the movie with her thin, luminous face and serious eyes. She and director Caro avoid the cloying precocity that can be a pitfall for this kind of role.
In general shape the story is predictable, but in its details it continually surprises, shortchanging the obvious and detouring down unexpected byways. It has moments that bring a tightness to the throat, and you become aware of tears without quite knowing how they got there. And the story carries a much broader portfolio against injustice than simply "socking it to the guy thing." Pai and Rawiri are linked in their inability, simply through the accident of their birth, to satisfy the immutable requirements of Koro's tradition. Rawiri, once an athlete, has degenerated into a fat, sloppy, beer-drinking lout. "I could never be what he wanted," he says to Pai. "Neither could I," she replies. Porourangi too has suffered under the rigid rules of expectation, but he has broken away and gone to a distant continent to pursue his vocation as an artist. The overcoming of prejudice and defiance of tradition even extends to Ihimaera's book itself: Whale Rider was the first novel by a Maori author to be published in New Zealand.
A note of interest: there are whales in this movie, and as you might expect they figure in the climax. They look as real as can be, but in fact they are digital creations. In this brave new world anything, it seems, is possible.
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