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.) (read the rest of this shit…)
