Jodie Foster plays a woman who never developed proper, understandable speech because her mother isolated her from civilization for the majority of her life, ever since she was small.
Why was Foster's character so isolated? Why did the mother want to isolate the two of them? The movie does not make that clear. There are hints that it had something to do with the mother's fear that Foster's character would be raped. (Numerous references are made to the penis being a sword, sex being frightening, and so forth.) There are also hints that Foster's character had a twin sister and that this was another reason behind the isolation.
In any event, Liam Neeson, playing some sort of psychologist or expert or something, comes in to help find out what's going on, after someone finds out that the mother has died. (The two women get groceries delivered weekly; these groceries are placed on their doorstep so that nobody discovers that Foster's character exists. I suppose the mother figured she'd live forever or something.)
The dramatic tension comes between Neeson and Joely Richardson (his real-life wife and screen lover and colleague), who disagree about whether Nell should be exposed to the outside world and if so, how fast this exposure should happen. Their supervisor is in a hurry to get Nell into the outside world as fast as possible, leading to Nell's nervous breakdown and a court hearing which ultimately goes Nell's way.
This movie is ultimately unsatisfying because the whole argument between all the experts about what to do with Nell seems like such a straw man. Who says Nell's way of doing things is as bad as Neeson's supervisor seems to think it is? Who says our civilization is so great as it stands? Why are we trying to drag a woman, obviously more capable of coping with her environment than a lot of people, into an environment that is not good for everyone? I think it's because we, at our root, are a chauvinistic culture which thinks it is always right. I don't care if you're Russian, Swedish, or a New World Order fanatic; you probably have traces of this culture in your system. Every single culture on the planet tries to drag isolates into the fold unthinkingly rather than examine what makes the culture so bad that some want to escape it. This movie does nothing to question that assumption, and that is why I cannot recommend it.
The backwoods of North Carolina is where Nell Jodie Foster lives all alone. She has her own form of language and no idea of a world beyond her small p...More at Family Video
Academy Award& winner Jodie Foster gives a fearless, fierce, beautifully attuned performance (Time Magazine) as Nell, a young woman living alone in th...More at Buy.com
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