Grey Owl
**
Rated on a 4-star
scale
Screening venue: Odeon (Liverpool City Centre)
Released in the UK by Fox on November 3, 2000; certificate PG; 118 minutes;
countries of origin Canada/UK/USA; aspect ratio 2.35:1
Directed by Richard Attenborough; produced
by Richard Attenborough, Jake Eberts, Claude Leger.
Written by William Nicholson.
Photographed by Roger Pratt; edited by Lesley
Walker.
CAST.....
Pierce Brosnan..... Archie Grew Owl
Stewart Bick..... Cyrus Finney
Vlasta Vrana..... Harry Champlin
Neil Kroetsch..... First Hunter
His real name was Archie Belaney. He was a well-off
kid raised by two aunts in Hastings, England, who studied all the books and
collected all the memorabilia he could find about Native Americans. By the
age of 18 he was in Canada, working as a beaver trapper and forest guide,
masquerading as an Ojibway Indian named 'Grey Owl'.
Grey Owl became famous in the 1930s, when he quit
hunting beaver, realising their importance and the fact they were becoming
extinct. He toured the world giving lectures on the fragility of nature;
some call him the father of the conservationist movement. Only after his
death was the news broken of his true identity.
One of the major problems of Sir Richard
Attenborough's "Grey Owl" -- and there are several -- is the
casting of Pierce Brosnan in the lead role. Nobody would ever believe this
guy as a Red Indian; his voice and face just don't click, and Brosnan's accent
in this movie is an agonising combination of Irish, English, Scottish and
American. The acting is uninspired throughout. Everyone talks in dead,
uncharismatic monotone, as if they were so in awe of the teachings of the
real Grey Owl they did not want to make his world human.
Most of the picture is a love story between Grey
Owl and his third wife, who made such an impression on me that I can't even
remember her name. When she first meets him, she's a town girl who inexplicably
follows him into the wilderness, despite being warned of the dangers and
told to "Go back home!" They soon develop quite a relationship. Everything
Grey Owl says or does, his woman responds to with "I like!" Every time the
woman asks a question, Grey Owl replies "Sure!"
The main setback is that the story is not suited
to cinema. It's well made enough on a technical level, and I don't understand
how despite the clout of Attenborough and Brosnan, the film did not land
an American distributor. But this is a tale that would only be interesting
as an encyclopaedia entry, or at best a BBC documentary. Screenwriter William
Nicholson bends things preposterously to make way for convenient Hollywood
moments -- witness, for example, the over-simplified nature of Grey Owl's
confession, and the sickening melodrama of a scene where he wails "Oh God,
I'm so sorry!" about something very frivolous, to the strains of war movie
violin music. And a scene in which a beaver drowns in a trap is so passionless
that all I could think was, hehe, wet beaver. Sorry.
COPYRIGHT© 2000 Ian
Waldron-Mantgani
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