'Nell': Traveling from isolation to modern world

By Primastuti Handayani

JAKARTA (JP): Have you ever imagined running away from the crowded and polluted city to a peaceful hut near a beautiful lake? Inhaling fresh, morning air and listening to the birds singing while watching the sun rise must be a dream of most city people.

Can people survive without electricity or a telephone? Can people really isolate themselves from the world?

Nell says she can.

In a world were people have a motive for everything they do, Nell says she is different.

Sought by a physician and a shrink for their ambitious curiosity for knowledge, Nell gives them her true love.

Nell (Jodie Foster) is a young woman who is isolated from the outside world by her mother in the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina.

Nell is discovered only after a grocery delivery boy finds the dead body of her mother and calls sheriff Todd Peterson (Nick Searchy) and local doctor Jerome "Jerry" Lovell (Liam Neeson).

Lovell finds the girl hiding in her room. She is absolutely wild, incapable of communicating with other people.

At first Jerry thinks that Nell speaks in her own language. He goes to Paula Olsen (Natasha Richardson), an ambitious psychologist, to study the young woman.

Together, Lovell and Olsen embark on a new project: To help Nell to adapt to 20th century. Both study her for three months before a court hearing to determine her fate.

They camp out on the Fontana dam. Lovell uses a tape recorder to help him understand Nell's language, which is actually imperfect English. Olsen uses a video recorder to study her movements and routines.

They both find that Nell is always shadowed by her identical sister Milly, who died 10 years earlier.

At the same time, both try hard to introduce civilization to Nell by giving her popcorn and Patsy Cline's greatest hits Crazy. It takes a while for them to realize that Nell does not need their help. Instead, they need her help to realize their ambition and love for each other.

Unfortunately, news of a wild woman in the forest spreads quickly and a local journalist tells the world.

Lovell and Olsen then attempt to shelter her from the mobs and Dr. Alexander Paley (Richard Libertini), the head of the research project.

Foster, as producer, gives ample room to the other characters while, like always, playing her role extraordinarily.

As Nell, Foster's uses body language and a new verbal language. When she imagines Milly asking her to sing and dance under the tree where the wind blows, no words come from her lips. Her body expresses her feelings.

Foster, a double Academy Award winner for the Accused in 1988 and Silence of the Lambs in 1991, says, "There is something essentially pure and authentic about Nell, a quality most people have lost. Nell is a woman who sees the world with all of her senses, not just through her mind."

An alumni of Yale University, she debuted as an actress at three years old. She gained international attention after starring in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver in 1976, recognition that continued when a fan tried to kill American President Ronald Reagan just to attract her attention.

Liam Neeson does not give his best performance, compared to his other movies (Rob Roy and the Mission).

His performance doesn't touch his acting in Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, for which he earned an Academy Award, a Golden Globe Award and a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award last year.

Natasha Richardson, Neeson's wife in the real life, performs well as an intellectual psychologist who suffers from a childhood trauma. The English stage actress has increased her demand in Hollywood with Nell.

Director Michael Apted uses the same eye that earned him an Academy Award for Gorillas in the Mists to shoot Fontana Dam.

The 1994 International Documentary Award winner uses closeups of Nell's motions to mimic the conflict between isolated and "civilized people".

Despite its great story, Nell's eloquent courtroom rebuttal is hard to take. Surrounded by a sea of people, she manages to argue that she only wants her simple life.

The ending is very Hollywood. The protagonist always gets what she wants.

Nell, however, illustrates that in this rough world, where life is hard and people ignore each other, there a some people willing to share their feelings with others. Nell sees the world with innocence, not knowing it isn't all as peaceful as her woods.