Rated: PG
Directed by: Glendyn Ivin
Based on the book by: Cameron Bloom and Bradley Trevor Greive
Produced by: Naomi Watts, Emma Cooper, Bruni Papandrea, Steve Hutensky, Jody Matterson
Starring: Naomi Watts, Andrew Lincoln, Jackie Weaver, Griffin Murray-Johnston.
‘Mum’s not the person she once was and she’s not the person she wanted to be.’
When a railing on a rooftop lookout gives way under her weight during an idyllic family holiday in Thailand, Sam (Naomi Watts) plunges several storeys to the ground. Sam had been an ‘awesome’ mum, the type who would go surfing and skateboarding with her three boys and would be at the centre of all the fun until she finds herself wheelchair bound.
The film opens at first light with a soaring bird’s eye view of the cliff tops surrounding Sydney’s Northern Beaches. The ocean is calm and clear, and the location is stunning. It’s a year after Sam’s accident and she is failing to adjust to her new reality. It’s an adjustment that not everyone makes. When the boys fall ill it is their father (Andrew Lincoln) they call for; as a mother she can barely even make the boys a cut lunch for school. Sam has always loved the water, now she dreams that she is sinking to the bottom of the ocean trapped in her wheelchair and, to her horror, it doesn’t feel unpleasant.
It is not only Sam’s vertebrae that are broken, the family are barely managing either. In his room, Noah (Griffin Murray-Johnston) is secretly videotaping the fragments of his mother’s life that have survived after Sam momentarily gives in to her rage and pain and smashes all the photos of her former life hanging above the mantelpiece. Blaming himself for his mother’s accident, Noah cuts himself off.
On a trip to the beach with his brothers, Noah is wandering alone when he notices a large goanna. Following its eye line, he spies a magpie chick in deadly peril. The little black and white bundle of feathers had fallen from its nest high in the treetops and, while it had survived the fall, it had lost its mother and is about to become supper for a hungry reptile.
Noah carries the tiny orphan home, but it cries out pretty raucously whenever it is left alone and it isn’t interested in eating. Even when Penguin settles into the household, the bird is reluctant to fly. Noah muses that maybe Penguin isn’t able to fly because she is motherless: ‘I read that baby birds dream of their mother’s soul and that’s how they learn to sing.’
Penguin’s predicament is, in many ways, a parallel to Sam’s. Neither one was what they might have been before their fall but they will both become, ‘Much more than that’.
Penguin Bloom is a quietly poetic and uplifting film. One that asks those questions for which there are no answers, but need to be asked regardless. Every year 20 million people visit Thailand, and that railing could have collapsed at any time on any one of them, yet it collapsed exactly when it did.
By the way, if you like to walk out as soon as the credits roll you’ll be missing out on a treat this time.