Writings

NIM'S ISLAND (2008)

Nim Rusoe (Breslin) lives on an otherwise uninhabited island ‘somewhere in the Pacific’ with her father Jack (Butler).  When Jack goes missing at sea during a massive storm, Nim finds an email from her fictional hero, Alex Rover, on Jack’s computer.  Nim needs a hero – but ‘Alex Rover’ is actually Alexandra (Foster), a neurotic writer who is afraid to leave her house in San Fransisco to go to the letterbox.  How will she save Nim?

White Fantasy stuff from the realm of picket fences and Enid Blyton sends the post-colonial clock into serious rewind.  Not only are Nim and Jack living out the coloniser’s dream – on an ‘uninhabited island’ where any ‘natives’ are assumed into non-existence (just as the British common law managed to declare the Australian continent ‘terra nullius’) – but it’s their island which must be defended from invaders!  Of course, this is how the coloniser likes to imagine her/his world: ‘unknown’ and ‘discoverable’.  In this upside-down world, the American child Nim’s fictional hero is one Alex Rover (also played by Butler), a Scottish Indiana Jones type who battles all manner of dark and savage people across the Middle East and Africa – all dreamed up by the writer from her wealthy-chic Frisco apartment.  Continuing the spirit of inversion is the evil cruise ship full of vulgar and gluttonous Australians who spread themselves all over the American ‘homeland’.  This caricature of cruise-goers is probably the closest thing the film has to a redemptive feature, though the irony that Americans are portrayed as the ‘victims’ of excessive consumption is too ridiculous to contemplate.  The film’s tagline (‘Be the hero of your own story’) does potentially de-emphasise the film’s other message – that ‘no man or woman is an island’ – but this is a minor matter.  Mr Percival from Colin Thiele’s Storm Boy makes an unexected CGI comeback as ‘Galileo’ in quite possibly only the second time in film history that a pelican emerges as the hero.  By and large, Nim’s Island is thoroughly offensive, and Breslin’s character retains far too much of the demanding narcissism of marketed children’s ‘culture’ to be watchable for long.  Thumbs down.