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A Payoff in Patience: A Lesson in Love
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11343 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1986 |
595 Words |
| Author
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Douglas C. Moore
Douglas C. Moore, an internationally recognized silent-film
specialist and a former president of the National Society of
Cinephiles, is now professor of English at Metropolitan
Community College, Kansas City, Missouri. |
Writer/director Nick Castle has given us a delightful fantasy adventure, beautifully gift wrapped in subtle lessons of love thy neighbor, kindness, and simple service to those who need our help, especially those who may be different and special.
The film is The Boy Who Could Fly, a Lorimar Pictures presentation released by Twentieth Century Fox. While the target audience is patently young, particularly youth groups and schoolchildren, the film readily transcends not only age lines but traditional cultural barriers as well. The poignancy of its message and the weight of its worth will find harbor in the heart of any human being who has ever needed love and understanding, who has ever wanted to reach out and give love and understanding.
It opens as a simple story of a small family: a widowed mother, with Milly, her fourteen-year-old daughter, and Louis, her feisty six year-old son. The three have just moved into a somewhat run-down house where they'll try to adjust both financially and emotionally after the recent death of the father. Mom finds a difficult job at the bank where she used to work, Louis and his dog try to outsmart the neighborhood bullies, and Milly plays the little mother and cook at home and tries to adjust to a new school.
But there's something else. There's a boy next door. He's Milly's age, but he's odd. He's autistic and doesn't talk. Most of his spare time is spent either making paper airplanes or sitting perched on the windowsill of his second-story bedroom, his arms outstretched as if he were flying. Milly sees him opposite her own window, and she wonders. At school she learns that Eric's parents were killed in a plane crash a few years ago, that he hasn't spoken since, that he thinks he can fly, and they all fear he'll fall off the roof someday. The other kids avoid him, but Milly befriends him, trying to draw him out. He lives with an alcoholic uncle, played with Academy Award quality by Fred Gwynne, and when the uncle is drunk, the boy is often taken to a mental hospital.
Milly and her mother affect his release, and as Milly finds Eric appearing suddenly in odd places, she understands he's confiding in her that he actually can fly. He proves it by taking Milly on a Superman-style flight through the sky, a lovely fantasy special effect for viewers, but more than that, an example not only of the oneness that grows from mutual trust, but also the proof that patience ultimately pays off, at least in the case of Milly and Eric. We weep with joy as Milly does, when Eric finally haltingly speaks her name
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