Nell (1994)

Michael Apted's Nell arrives with the gravity of a case study and the pacing of a nature documentary shot at dusk. Jodie Foster, who also produced, plays a woman raised in a North Carolina cabin by a stroke-impaired mother and a twin sister who did not survive childhood. The performance is the film's whole weather system. Foster builds a private language out of clipped syllables and frightened glances, and the camera lingers on her as though unsure whether to document or diagnose. The screenplay, adapted from Mark Handley's play Idioglossia, treats that cognitive difference as the central mystery, and the film's most durable claim on our attention is its portrait of a mind that sorts the world differently. A courtroom doctor eventually supplies the label. The movie supplies the dignity.

Around this performance orbits a modest procedural. A town physician (Liam Neeson) wants to leave Nell alone. A researcher (Natasha Richardson) wants to study her. A court grants three months of observation, and the observation arrives by houseboat, bristling with monitoring equipment. The film's politics are of an older, gentler strain: the individual against the institution, the right to exist without a file being opened. There is a skinny-dipping scene, some unpolished nudity, and a general willingness to let a body be a body without commentary. The movie is more interested in whether Nell can be loved than in whether she can be categorized, though it spends a fair amount of time in rooms where educated people explain her to each other.

What the film does not have is instructive. Race goes unmentioned in a North Carolina that appears to contain no Black people. The forest is scenery, not a cause. There is no queerness, no economic sermon, no lecture about the planet. This is a 1994 studio drama with a humanist heart and a taste for melodrama. Its cultural ambitions extend about as far as asking the audience to be kind to a stranger. We are left with a film about a woman who cannot speak the language, made by people who mostly can, and a lead performance that outclasses everything around it.