Heartwarming Honkers 'Fly Away' Is A Movie For Goose-Lovers, Among Others. By Stacey Richter MOVIES FOR KIDS tend to be relentlessly cute, relentlessly heartwarming and pitilessly dumb. What a surprise then to find Fly Away Home, a spare and beautifully photographed film that portrays the life and feelings of its young heroine with restraint and dignity. Anna Paquin, the young actor who won an Academy Award for her role in The Piano, plays Amy Alden, a girl who goes to live with her father in Canada after her mother dies in a car crash. Her dad, a loony inventor (Jeff Daniels), is distracted and inept as a father; Amy is lonely and withdrawn and mopes around the barn, having flashbacks of the good times with her mom. In this miserable state she rescues an abandoned nest of goose eggs and stashes them in the barn. When the goslings hatch, they take one look at Amy and reason that she must be their mother. Fly Away Home forswears the pounding pathos of many kids' movies and aims instead for a less manipulative (and less dramatic) mood of dreamy communion. The almost obligatory scene of the death of the mother (remember Bambi?) is photographed by cinematographer Caleb Deschanel with gentleness and style. When the mother and daughter's car flips over in the rain, we see fuzzy spinning lights from Amy's point of view, then the windshield wipers stop, all of it quieted and softened by the pretty Mary Chapin Carpenter song on the soundtrack. (Compare this with the lack of mercy shown in the recent Bogus, where a semi plows full speed into Mom's moribund car.) When the goslings hatch, the movie becomes centered on the slow and steady progress of familial bonding. First the chicks imprint on Amy, trailing her like a shadow wherever she goes. Amy in turn protects the birds with touching devotion, particularly since she herself is a motherless child. She sleeps with them, she showers with them, she lets them eat cereal out of her bowl on the kitchen table. Her father tolerates all this because he can see how much the chicks mean to his slightly troubled daughter. Slowly and surely, the father and daughter start to bond as well. Punctuating all this growing closeness is the occasional crisis and villainous act. But unlike movies for grown-ups, Fly Away Home doesn't really deal out much serious threat or conflict. A game warden threatens to pinion the gosling's wings, pointing out that domestically raised wild geese have an impulse to migrate; without a mother to show them the way, they are bound to get lost or shot by hunters. At one point the evil game warden confiscates the protesting geese, but Amy and her dad kidnap them back in short order. There's tension, but it doesn't last for very long. Instead of pursuing high drama, director Carroll Ballard devotes long, lyrical portions of film to Amy's flight. As it turns out (what luck!), her crazy inventor father flies an ultralight plane, which fortuitously travels at about the same speed as your average migrating goose. Amy and her dad decide to fly the ultralights south, in hopes the birds will follow. Ballard treats us to shot after shot of Amy, in her goose-shaped ultralight, leading her brood to happier hunting grounds. Some of the shots are computer enhanced, but some are not, and the footage is amazing. The geese fly their little hearts out, and when they stop to rest, they swim their little hearts out too. Cinematographer Deschanel makes swamps look like Japanese paintings. The kind of wildlife footage seen on television pales in comparison. Fly Away Home has less dialogue than most movies and more uninterrupted imagery. Its spare and patient pacing help to attenuate what could easily become a heavy-handed theme: The little girl, who has been hurt by the death of her mother, has herself become a mother and is learning to fly. She is soaring! And so forth. But with its slow pace, Fly Away Home allows the meaning to sneak up, and Paquin, who is alternately spooky and triumphant, seems to indeed have been transformed by the end of the film. In fact, Paquin's light, natural performance is a pleasure to watch; the only problem is that she makes her colleagues look stiff and contrived. Despite all of its strengths, Fly Away Home still might be a little too cute for the average adult viewer. But if you have a love for geese, pre-pubescent girls or wildlife photography, or if you yourself are 11 years old, this is just the ticket. Fly Away Home is playing at Century Park (620-0705) and El Dorado (745-6241) cinemas.

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