FLY AWAY HOME is one of the great PG-rated movies of 1996, and a true family film as opposed to one for kids. It’s for all ages, because it’s about cute animals, but also a 13-year-old girl trying to find herself after life-shattering loss, but also an eccentric adult trying to get his shit together as a parent while staying true to his ideals, and how they do those things together by both caring about the goslings orphaned by developers intruding on their land.

It begins unusually heavy for any rating, with a musical montage in which a mother and daughter are joking around in the car and then are blindsided by a truck. There’s no diegetic sound, just Mary Chapin Carpenter singing “Fare Thee Well,” the ladies laughing, then the P.O.V. from inside the spinning and rolling car, blacking out, seeing lights shining and emergency workers breaking through the already cracked windshield. When Amy (Academy Award winner Anna Paquin in her third movie) wakes up in the hospital and her dad Thomas (Jeff Daniels following SPEED and DUMB AND DUMBER) is by her side she says, “Why are you here? Where’s Mom?” Devastating.

She moves from New Zealand to his farm in Ontario. He says don’t worry, I’ll get all the junk moved out of your bedroom so it looks just like you remember it. She says I don’t remember it. The house is big and cluttered, full of tools and trinkets, his metal sculptures and award-winning inventions, evidence of an adventurous life she wasn’t ever a part of. When he’s trying to explain why the fuck he has a life-sized replica of the lunar lander he starts saying how he built it around the time she and her mom left, and seems to become self-conscious mid-sentence of the obvious fact that him building a fucking space ship was part of what precipitated that. (But he continues to explain why it’s great.)

The next day Amy wakes up while Dad is outside testing a glider he built. Big metal wings on his shoulders that he can barely stand up with. I like this arguably selfish notion that he’s gonna continue his oddball shit even now that he’s a single dad. At least in the morning before she wakes up.

He runs carrying this contraption and jumps off a little hill. What is he, a fucking Wright Brother? But it works. She runs around to the different windows and then along the porch, peering up at his stunt in fascination, but when he lands messily and doesn’t get up right away we understand what she’s thinking about and why she runs back inside.

This movie isn’t much like HARRIET THE SPY, released a few months earlier, but it shares the admirable traits of not over-explaining, and of letting us sit in uncomfortable emotions and know that it will be okay. Paquin is great at wordlessly showing her teenage disapproval of everything going on here, mostly fairly subtle except when she meets Dad’s girlfriend Susan (Dana Delany, LIGHT SLEEPER). (Definitely his fault for not mentioning her before she showed up.) Amy seems to like going through the old clothes and things left behind by her mother, and seeing a tire swing she remembers, but she’s clearly miserable here, not making any close friends, and not at an age to care about the natural beauty of the place.

Then she finds the nest of 17 goose eggs in a wrecked field. I probly didn’t clock in ’96 that she carries them in a baby bjorn found in the barn that surely was used by her mother to carry her. Dealing with the loss of her mother by acting as a mother to these birds. She hides them in a barn and sneaks over to them when she can until she goes missing at night and they find her asleep in a pile of goslings.

Thomas goes to town meetings and comes off as kind of a kook railing at the developers, but Animal Regulation officer Glen Seifert (Jeremy Ratchford, HEARTS OF FIRE, PROM NIGHT III, UNFORGIVEN, and a soldier in THE STUPIDS!) seems like an ally when he stands up and says something nice about trying to protect the wildlife. He later comes over to advise them about the geese but Thomas chases him off the property when he tries to clip their wings as required by law.

They’re coming up against the reality that the birds are gonna instinctively try to fly south for the winter, but not know where to go. He notices that the geese follow Amy wherever she goes (amazing scenes done with real baby geese) and comes up with the hair-brained scheme of building a glider slow enough for them to follow and leading them south. So it’s a nature movie and a father-daughter movie and a problem solving movie like APOLLO 13 or something. Thomas and his brother David (Terry Kinney, BODY SNATCHERS) and buddy Barry (Holter Graham, TWO EVIL EYES) work together to engineer solutions, including that Amy will have to fly the glider herself. I seem to remember some people criticizing this as child endangerment at the time, which is fair enough. The movie sells it by having that not be the plan until she steals Dad’s glider and shows him that it could work.

We get montages of lessons and tests and rehearsals until the big journey, which becomes a media event and also (unnecessarily, in my opinion) a BREAKIN’ 2 type scenario with a bad guy businessman (Ken James, STREET JUSTICE) who gets to develop the plot of land across Lake Ontario if the geese don’t land on it by a specific deadline, so supporters gather there with signs waiting for “the goose girl.” There are also perilous and/or cute encounters with hunters, the military, tall buildings, and sympathetic locals who saw them on TV. But even the corniest parts work because they never lay it on too thick and we’re already so on board anyway it would take something drastic to break the spell.

The screenplay is credited to Robert Rodat (who had only done TALL TALE but would follow this with SAVING PRIVATE RYAN) and Vince McKewin (an actor who was in COMMUNION and would later write the Keanu Reeves football movie THE REPLACEMENTS). I’m not sure how many directors could’ve pulled it off besides Carroll Ballard, the Academy Award nominated documentarian and STAR WARS second unit cinematographer turned director of THE BLACK STALLION (1979), NEVER CRY WOLF (1983) and WIND (1992). And he wisely got d.p. Caleb Deschanel, who’d shot THE BLACK STALLION as well as MORE AMERICAN GRAFFITI and THE RIGHT STUFF. In my opinion a guy who’s good at, like, camera stuff.

It has such a feeling of reality with all this nature and real geese. I really wondered how they did the flying – is it a real glider with animated birds? Both animated? Both real? According to a Virginian-Pilot article from the time “The geese you see are all real, except for the scene when they fly through skyscrapers in Baltimore.” (I know that excludes the scene where the one named Igor crashes into the glider.)

The reason they knew how to do it is that the movie is inspired by a real guy named Bill Lishman and his autobiography Father Goose: One Man, a Gaggle of Geese, and Their Real Life Incredible Journey South. He was basically the Daniels character: he really made metal sculptures, really invented a pneumatic refrigerator (for his weird underground home, I wish that was in the movie!), really built a replica of the lunar lander and sold it, really built custom gliders and figured out how to make birds follow him. He was inspired by meeting William Carrick, the director of an IMAX movie who had allowed geese to imprint on him so they’d follow his boat. Lishman experimented with geese for 3 years trying to get them to follow the glider before it occurred to him he could migrate with them. This evolved into Operation Migration, meant to help endangered birds such as whooping cranes to relearn their migration routes. Because of this experience Lishman was Daniels’ flying double in the movie, provided the geese, and when production ended led them in his glider to a wildlife center on the coast of South Carolina for the winter.

A 20/20 story about Lishman led Columbia to buy the movie rights. I’m glad they didn’t market it as a true story, because the emotional center of it is completely fictional – the real guy had a bunch of kids and a wife who was neither dead or estranged. But I like it. I think it’s amazing both that a guy like this existed and that they built such a moving, human story around him. Daniels and Paquin are so good at playing these stubborn, unique people who manage to find common ground in such an unlikely way.

It’s also just a nice tribute to good weirdos – artistic people and non-conformists who live for their ideals, passions, and weird little projects. On one of the blu-ray extras they talk to one of Lishman’s collaborators, who describes them both as being between artistic minds and scientific minds. I don’t relate to that part but that’s why they can do something like this. We need more of those these days: people who know machines and math and science and things but are guided by kind, artistic souls. They can save birds and they can make nice movies like this.

Thank you to Borg9 for writing that he wished summer was a week longer so I would revisit this. Sometimes wishes do come true! (No comment on my original review of this, posted on a newsgroup in 1999.)