Whale Rider

Legend of the Rise

By COLLEEN CREAMER

For The City Paper

The lovely New Zealand movie Whale Rider (written and directed by Niki Caro from the novel by Witi Ihimaera) is part ramshackle myth and part heartbreaking indie film. The film is raw and beautiful all over the place, but one of the primary reasons to put the kids in the family van and go see it is to witness a truly dazzling performance by the young Keisha Castle-Hughes. Make no mistake: This is no Disney movie, although some might disagree concerning the ending.

Shot with an all-Maori cast in the New Zealand fishing village of Whangara, Whale Rider moves often harshly and unexpectedly.  Maori patriarch Koro (Rawiri Paratene) is trying desperately to hold on to the ways and the lineage of his ancestors who, as Maori legend goes, arrived on the backs of whales eons earlier. The tribe’s connection to whales seems to serve as a kind of oceanic link to the gods.

Koro’s son Porourangi (Cliff Curtis) has passed on taking the reins of the fading culture, and when Porourangi’s wife and male son die during childbirth, only the little twin girl Pai is left, not exactly what the crusty grandfather wants. The bereft son leaves the island and the girl stays to be raised in the Maori culture. By 11 years of age Pai’s soul is pure Maori. She yearns to understand the ways of her ancestors, but her grandfather, believing the genes of girls do not carry the calling, banishes her from the lessons he has arranged to reinvigorate the culture.

As the reedy, stubborn Pai insults her grandfather by invading the lessons or trying to learn them on her own, we begin to feel her desperation and the exasperation of the grandfather whose cruelty to Pai often seems unwarranted. And because the culture has been a little infiltrated by hooch and pot, one cannot help but feel a little protective of Karo’s efforts.

Still, to the director’s credit, the boys’ lessons have just the right amount of lameness and witless execution one would expect. And they do something else. The tone of low expectation sets up a kind of hushed quiet one might feel just as the ocean was pulling us out into a tidal wave. So far these are real people with real problems. I cannot remember witnessing sadness delivered as wrenchingly by a young actress as when Pai struggles to hem in her weeping at witnessing her grandfather’s empty seat during her recitation of Maori legend at her school play. She is literally a dam ready to break.

Still, she seems to grasp the gravity of the situation. She calls to the whales to help her grandfather who has “taken to the bed” with depression. And arrive they do in a scene that is the beginning of the film transcending its earthly limits. Some have said Whale Rider should have ended at its tragic apex (a masculine ending), but that would have thrown the story of Pai into Maori legend and the lineage might have become just another dominator model of gender and who gets to do the fire dance. But that wasn’t really the point. The conclusion was beautiful, brilliant, innocent and brave. Some stories are better told with a happy ending, especially those that are meant to go on and on.

–From The City Paper