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Nim's Island Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: PG (for mild adventure action and brief language) Genre: Family Theater release: April 04, 2008 by Fox Walden Directed by: Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin Runtime: 1 hour 35 minutes Cast: Abigail Breslin (Nim Rusoe), Gerard Butler (Jack Rusoe / Alex Rover), Jodie Foster (Alexandra Rover), Maddison Joyce (Edmund), Peter Callan (Edmund's Father), Rhonda Doyle (Edmund's Mother), Michael Carman (Captain) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Nim's Island is the latest so-so effort from Walden Media. Like most of their films, it is based on a children's book, and like many of their films, it is directed by a first-time feature-film director—or, in this case, by two people who have never directed a feature film before. But lest you enter the theater with low expectations, the film is also graced with enthusiastic performances by actors who clearly enjoy being part of a story that teaches positive lessons—and a little enthusiasm can go a long way, even when it is not clear just where the story itself is going.

Abigail Breslin as Nim

The part of Nim herself is played by the 11-year-old Abigail Breslin, who was last seen in Definitely Maybe as a young girl who asks her about-to-divorced dad to tell her a bedtime story about his love life. Nim, thankfully, is not so precocious, or at least not in that way; she has spent the bulk of her life with her dad on a remote island in the South Pacific, where she plays with various animals and "escapes" by reading the adventure novels of an Indiana Jones-like figure named Alex Rover.

When she reads these novels, Nim imagines that the dashing, heroic Alex Rover is a man just like her dad, Jack Rusoe (Gerard Butler)—except that where her dad is a marine biologist who hopes to discover a new form of nanoplankton and name it after his daughter, she imagines Alex Rover being a much more rugged, combative individual. To the film's credit, it allows Jack to be masculine in his own way; the fact that he spends much of his time looking at his one-celled specimens through a microscope does not make him a mild-mannered geek. He is, indeed, an inspirational figure to his daughter in his own way—so when Nim visualizes her father as Alex Rover, it may be not so much because she wishes her father were living a different kind of life, but because her father is already a sort of hero to her.

Jodie Foster as Alexandra Rove

Confusing matters, though, is the fact that the Alex Rover books seem to be written in the first person, which apparently leads Nim to believe that they are not just adventure fantasies but have some kind of basis in fact. The truth, however, is very, very different: while the hero of the books is definitely a man, the author turns out to be one Alexandra Rover (Jodie Foster), an intensely neurotic woman whose fear of the outside world reaches almost Howard Hughes-like proportions. She hasn't left her San Francisco apartment in months, she won't go out to check the mail lest she expose herself to the rain, and she obsessively rubs her hands with Purell hand sanitizer. And her knowledge about all those faraway places that she writes about in her books? It seems to come entirely from the reference books on her shelf.

As it happens, Alexandra is struggling with writer's block, and as she goes looking for material that she can use in her next book, she chances upon an article written by Jack about the island that he and Nim live on. Alexandra sends an e-mail, and since Jack is away on his boat, Nim receives it and replies to it. Before long, the two have established just enough of a rapport that, when Nim is injured and a monsoon strikes the island—and possibly separates Nim from her father forever—Alexandra feels personally compelled to go to the island and, uh, do whatever she can.

Gerard Butler as Nim's dad, and as her hero Alex Rover

It's not really clear what Alexandra expects to do once she gets there; the important thing is, she faces her fears—repeatedly—as she leaves her home and makes her way to the island, losing all of her creature comforts along the way. (Her hand sanitizer doesn't make it past the airport security check; various clothing items are lost at sea.) And what helps her to face these fears is the fact that she, too, visualizes her hero Alex Rover, and imagines that he is goading her on to do all the things that she would do if she were a braver person just like him.

There is an important lesson here about the way in which courage is something we have to imagine, and then commit ourselves to—and about how sometimes, by imagining someone better than we are and then emulating that imaginary person, we can actually become better people ourselves. The lesson is bolstered by something Jack tells his daughter, that courage "is not just in you, it's in each choice we make, every single day." Courage is, in a sense, a habit that we need to learn.

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