Listener
25 January 2003
THE CHOSEN ONE
Niki Carol’s Whale Rider is the great New Zealand film that we’ve waited for since our peak film-making years of The Piano, Heavenly Creatures and Once Were Warriors.
BY PHILIP MATTHEWS
Whale Rider
Directed by Niki Carol; PG
THE PAST IS REMOTE, MYTHIC AND glorious. The present is subdued, or anxious, and the future of an entire people seems to hang in the balance. Like Fellowship of the Ring, Niki Caro’s Whale Rider begins with an intimate, saddened voice-over that links that past to this present. “Much that once was is lost” is how Fellowship had it, establishing the melancholic colours of a world from which both magic and goodness were vanishing. In the no less epic Whale Rider, adapted by Caro from a 1987 novel by Witi Ihimaera, 12-year-old Paikea (Keisha Castle-Hughes) creates a similar image with a candour that is heartbreaking: “There was no gladness when I was born”.
Lord of the whales? Generations ago, the heroic ancestor of the small East Coast community of Whangara arrived from Hawaiki on the back of a whale. His name, too, was Paikea. A whale-human bond was establ9ished then. Now/, the community waits for a boy to appear who will possess the same qualities – particularly, the gift of interspecies communication, a kind of human-whale telepathy – and lead them towards a renaissance. The community’s elder is Koro (Rawiri Paratene). His son is Porourangi (Cliff Curtis). Fulfilling the messianic criteria, the film opens with a legendary birth – of Porourangi’s twins – but it’s a scene that raises the emotional stakes of the novel and hits you harder than you are ready for: the mother and one of the twins, a boy, dies during birth. The girl lives. A distraught Porourangi flees and the girl is raised by her grandparents.
Those with an interest in New Zealand film can surely relate to messianic feelings and the slumps and disappointments that follow: when will the chosen film arrive? The great news is that Whale Rider is easily the strongest New Zealand film since the early 90s peak of Heavenly Creatures, Once Were Warriors and The Piano that is still cited by so many as the, well, remote, mythic and glorious past. Whale Rider is a confident blend of tragedy, comedy and innate, intuitive mysticism. In her first feature, Memory and Desire (1998), Caro showed that she had a sensitivity for handling grief and trauma, along with an artfulness and a talent for getting a lot out of actors – and it would be nice if that overlooked debut film reached a wider audience on the back of Whale Rider. All the qualities that made Memory and Desire are here, too – you won’t ever have seen Curtis and Paratene give performances as eviscerating as their confrontation at the start of Whale Rider – but there are others, including the strain of natural, wry comedy that ran through some of Caro’s short films.
First, though, the grief. Whale Rider is a film framed by trauma: the birth at the start and a whale stranding much later. Anyone who reads New Zealand newspapers over summer knows that whale strandings are tragic and grotesque events: the diligent and often hopeless labour of human rescuers, the grave heaviness of the whales themselves, the sense of a disruption or reversal of nature. Those feelings, with an accompanying panic and horror, are in Ihimaera’s book and also Caro’s film, where the whale stranding seems like the product of magic gone wrong, a misapplication of scared knowledge. Here, that kind of magic is grounded in the everyday – it seems natural to both the people and the environment – and Caro moves between the natural world and the fantastic with such subtlety that the difference scarcely exists. What that means is this: no magic-realist effects and no anthropomorphic whale tricks. And although the Ihimaera book got into the whale mind, as well as developing an overt anti-whaling theme, in the film the creatures remain elemental and beautifully unknowable.
The whale stranding and, especially, the birth scene are the film at its most emotionally raw. Sadness lingers through other parts if it, but you also take away memories of its earthly, domestic humour and the idyllic beach-and-sea beauty of Whangara, as shot by cinematographer Leon Narbey, who last rhapsodised the New Zealand landscape as endless waves of green in The Price of Milk. There is a nostalgic quality about it that seems to have been carried over from the novel – written, of course, in a New York winter, which couldn’t be further from this. As pictured here, Whangara is not a bad place to feel homesick for, and the performances suit: there’s an easy, distinctly New Zealand comedy from such fine actors as Grant Roa, Rachel House and Vicky Haughton, along with Curtis and Paratene, when they aren’t facing off about the future of Maoridom.
But, in a film crammed with great performances, Castle-Hughes is good enough to be the obvious stand-out and a star in the making. Child-and-whale movies don’t have the greatest legacy – Free Willy, anyone? – and films such as this stand or fall on the appeal and ability of the child actor. One of the best things that you can say about Castle-Hughes is that she will make all audiences respond like parents: you will worry for her, feel for her and feel proud of her. That says a lot about the emotional investment that audiences will have in the film, and it’s partly to do with the highly charged emotional world that Caro creates in the earliest scenes and never loses control over, and partly to do with the quite brilliant Castle-Hughes.
In many ways, the girl Paikea’s story comes to follow the natural hero’s trajectory, as though she were King Arthur or Luke Skywalker – the child that no one expected to carry the birthright and lead the people – but it’s a trajectory charted with a heart-warming sense of humour, played like a cat and mouse game by Paratene and Castle-Hughes. Koro goes on pigheadedly training boys for the Whale Rider position – “I’m going to need all the first-born boys”, he announces, oddly Herod-like – and those boys are clumsy dimwits who can’t a candle to the natural Whale Rider. So, if that plot’s ultimate destination is an inescapable inevitability, how it gets there is both moving and funny, while any political messages are smuggled in. The book’s politics felt that much more urgent and explicit, but 15 years after the book, the movie arrives in and from a New Zealand where girls can do anything and the survival of Maoritanga, in Ihimaera’s metaphorical guise of “whale riding”, is a given rather than a vexed question. Whale Rider feels like a celebration of both those things, and many others – it may even make you come over all patriotic, if you let it. You should.