Keisha Castle-Hughes makes her acting debut as Pai, a young Maori girl, in Whale Rider.
Coming of age in New Zealand
Whale Rider (PG-13) (105 min.) Themes of adolescent angst, intergenerational conflict and Maori myth combine in this gently and compassionately observed drama, set in a tiny fishing village on the coast of New Zealand, where the film was shot using a cast of mostly nonprofessional actors.
Whale Rider, a film festival award-winner around the globe, is slow-moving but absorbing, and far more thoughtful than the majority of movies meant to connect with younger audiences. Writer-director Niki Caro, a New Zealander who adapted the movie from the novel by Maori author Witi Ihimaera, only occasionally stoops to sentimentality and cliche.
Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes making an impressive debut) establishes a downbeat tone at the start, with a voiceover about her tribe's long search for a new leader. "There was no gladness when I was born," she says. "My twin brother died and took our mother with him."
Her stern but loving grandfather, Koro (Rawiri Paratene), a village chief who traces his ancestry back to the tribe's founder, had hoped for a grandson to fulfill ancient prophecies. Pai's own father (Cliff Curtis, a popular movie bad guy), like many of the community's other males, has mostly abandoned his village, and his daughter. Working in Europe as an artist, he seldom returns.
The conflict between Koro's convictions about the tribe and Pai's own yearnings to please her grandfather by becoming the hoped-for leader is at the center of Caro's artfully told film, spiked with digitally created footage of a mammoth whale cruising the ocean. The resolution comes courtesy of an incident that leans far into the mystic; most viewers will be willing to take the ride. B
