In “Fly Away Home,” Amy Alden’s mother and father divorced when she was three. Her father, Tom, was an inventor, a dreamer, and her mother couldn’t see a future for herself and her daughter with a man who was willing to give up everything he had to build a model of the Lunar Lander. Amy (Anna Paquin) grew up with her mother in New Zealand, far away from the Canadian home where she was born.
The year Amy turned thirteen, something horrible happened. While on a drive with her mother, a storm kicked up, and her mother had to swerve to avoid hitting a semi-truck that had lost control in the inclement conditions. The car went off the road and rolled repeatedly, and when Amy woke up, she was in the hospital, her father asleep by her bed. She hadn’t seen her father in years and his presence could only mean one thing: her mother was dead.
A month after the accident, Tom (Jeff Daniels) took Amy home to Canada and attempted to give her a new life. She hated school, she hated Canada, and she hated living with him. He tried to see things from her point of view; after all, she had just lost her mother and was now living with a father she barely knew, but she was making life hard on all of them.
Then one day a group of lumberjacks come to the area to bulldoze some of the woodlands near the Alden’s property. We catch an interesting sight of Jeff Daniels in red underwear as he runs outside to try to stop them, but it’s no use. Trees are gone, and the machinery chased away a flock of Canadian geese that was living in those trees. Amy finds their eggs later and carefully brings them to the barn, makes a rudimentary incubator, and they hatch. For the first time since her mother’s death, Amy has something to be happy about as she devotes herself to their care and keeping.
But without parent geese, the babies wouldn’t know how to fend for themselves. In nature, geese learn everything they need to know from their parents. A huge concern was their migratory instinct – they would want to fly, but they wouldn’t know where to go. After thinking about it for a long time, Tom comes up with an idea. He’ll build an ultra-light plane and fly with the geese to show them the way. But the geese will only follow Amy.
This movie is geared toward your pre-teen, and you’ll find it very suitable for that age group. It’s enlightening, it shows the power of a dream, and what’s more, it’s based on a true story. Gotta love that. I did find Amy’s sullen attitude to be a detractor from the plot, and again, while trying to understand what she had been through, she still pushed her limits. Overall, however, I enjoyed learning about the geese, seeing how the family managed to pull off their wild stunt, and seeing their dream come to fruition.
Rated PG for mild language and the opening accident scene.
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