|  "  F  l  y     A  w  a  y     H  o  m  e  "  |  

Directed by Carroll Ballard

Wild Blue Yonder The creator of "The Black Stallion" works his magic again By CHARLES TAYLOR if anyone working in the movies deserves to be called a magician, it's Carroll Ballard. The images in his new film, "Fly Away Home," have a rapt purity. It's not up to the level of his 1979 "The Black Stallion," but for long passages the story proceeds without any dialogue, and inducing a state of luxuriant wonder. The children around me were almost hushed -- the opposite of the restlessness that usually occurs at movies touted for kids. Ballard's magic has nothing to do with illusion or prefab innocence. He makes you feel you're seeing everything -- air, light, water, trees -- for the first time, and he makes it all register sensually. When Ballard ("The Black Stallion," "Never Cry Wolf," the enchanting "Nutcracker") shows us newborn geese popping out of their eggs, the way they roll their eyes to take in each new thing feels perfectly natural; he's already got us looking at the world as if we'd never seen it before. That's why Anna Paquin -- as Amy, who's lost her mother in a car accident and gone to live with her formerly estranged sculptor father (Jeff Daniels) in rural Ontario -- is so affecting. I couldn't stand her (or anything else) in "The Piano." Playing a sullen, closed-off child, she was closed-off as an actress. Here, as she watches the geese hatch, her face has an open beauty, a beauty waiting to be formed. She might be a newborn herself. Amy discovers the goose eggs after a developer's bulldozer has unearthed them. When they hatch and, because she's the first thing the goslings see, they assume she's their mother. Later, as Amy's charges grow, her adolescent long limbs and neck are a witty physical match for the lissome geese. When she shuts her father out, or greets his girlfriend (Dana Delany, actressy as usual) with a pickled expression, Paquin lets you feel the uncertain little girl inside this self-possessed 13-year old. She has never seemed more a kid than in the funny, lovely moment when her father, Tom, first finds her sleeping among the baby geese and she awakens to ask the eternal kids' question, "Can I keep 'em . . .pleeaase?" Geese, we're told, can learn only by imitation, so Amy's flock will have no one to lead them when their migratory instincts kick in. Worse, a Canadian law requires all domestically raised geese to be rendered flightless. Tom, who's something of a dreamer (his sculptures include dragons and a replica of the lunar landing module), is an ultralight-flying buff (ultralight flyers are winged, gas-powered machines in which the pilot takes off from a running start), and he comes up with a scheme to save the geese. He builds a machine for Amy to fly, allowing her to follow him as she leads her geese along a migratory route from Ontario to North Carolina. The screenplay, by Robert Rodat and Vince McKewin, is based on William Lishman's charming autobiography, "Father Goose." Lishman, a Canadian sculptor and ultralight flyer, got hooked on the high of flying with the birds, and then became interested in leading endangered species to areas from which they had disappeared. The story of Amy's reconciliation with the father she barely knows is the screenwriters' creation. Although the idea of her enabling the geese to separate from her as a means of learning to accept her own mother's death sounds obvious, Ballard gives it a deep emotional resonance. The pace falters at times, especially when the script succumbs to occasional preachiness, including a suspense device requiring Tom, Amy and the geese to reach North Carolina in time to stop a wetlands development. But working with master cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (who shot "The Black Stallion"), Ballard uses images to make wonderful poetic connections: Amy swaddling the eggs in a drawer of her dead mother's silk scarves; waking up in her hospital bed after the car accident, with Tom's arms stretched over her like a protective wingspan; remembering her mother pushing her on a swing, heartbreaking because as soon as she gets close enough to touch her mother, she's pushed away. The wordless opening sequence -- the car accident seen from Amy's point of view -- is quietly devastating, a wiper blade coming to a stop against a cracked windshield standing in for her mother's death. And the flying scenes are elating. The top of Amy's contraption is shaped like a giant goose. Ballard stretches time out in these scenes, making us feel like the sky is ours to roam, letting us marvel at whirring panoramas of foliage, fog-shrouded hills and rippling clouds reflected in the water beneath. There's a breathtaking shot of Amy, Tom and the geese zipping between the skyscrapers of Baltimore. The legacy of "The Black Stallion" has only begun to be felt in the last few years, in children's movies like "The Secret Garden" and "A Little Princess," movies that pull us into a child's emotional state, treat it with dignity and respect, and render it in vivid, sensual imagery. The kids who watch "Fly Away Home" are learning to read a movie visually (something most critics I know can't do). I object on principle to reducing art to its message (especially with all the nonsense about how what's aimed at children has to preach treacly virtues). But I can't help feeling good that, in our current conservative state, "Fly Away Home" tells kids that there's no reason to respect authority when you know in your heart it's wrong, and that wanting to be independent doesn't mean not loving your parents. The paradox of the movie's title is that home is wherever you find your wings.