Books, Arts & Manners: Natural Nellegance

IT WOULD be hard to find a more self-serving, fatuous, and totally useless film than Nell, co-produced by its star, Jodie Foster, as the ultimate ego trip. It deals with a young girl, Nell, who grows up in the Carolina wilderness. The only language she speaks is something private and incomprehensible she has derived from the speech of her mother. (Being illegitimate, she had no father around.) This mother had had a stroke, and spoke a kind of gibberish—rather like that mumbled after a stroke by Sir Anthony Hopkins in Legends of the Fall, which, along with Mixed Nuts, is one of the two foulest of the current crop of movies.

The genesis of Nell was this: “In 1989, producer Renée Missel [Miss Foster’s partner] saw a Los Angeles production of a play entitled Idioglossia, written by Mark Handley, and fell in love with its lead character, the beautiful and mysterious Nell.” This sentence from the press kit tells it all. I have no access to the original play, but I think I can reconstruct it from the distorting mirror of what has now been Fosterized into Nell, quite a leap from Idioglossia, which, of course, would spell instant death on the marquee and at the box office.

JS

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John Simon

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IT WOULD be hard to find a more self-serving, fatuous, and totally useless film than Nell, co-produced by its star, Jodie Foster, as the ultimate ego trip. It deals with a young girl, Nell, who grows up in the Carolina wilderness. The only language she speaks is something private and incomprehensible she has derived from the speech of her mother. (Being illegitimate, she had no father around.) This mother had had a stroke, and spoke a kind of gibberish—rather like that mumbled after a stroke by Sir Anthony Hopkins in Legends of the Fall, which, along with Mixed Nuts, is one of the two foulest of the current crop of movies.

The genesis of Nell was this: “In 1989, producer Renée Missel [Miss Foster’s partner] saw a Los Angeles production of a play entitled Idioglossia, written by Mark Handley, and fell in love with its lead character, the beautiful and mysterious Nell.” This sentence from the press kit tells it all. I have no access to the original play, but I think I can reconstruct it from the distorting mirror of what has now been Fosterized into Nell, quite a leap from Idioglossia, which, of course, would spell instant death on the marquee and at the box office.