Wild Child or Wise Woman?

By RICHARD CORLISS

It's not fair to Jodie Foster and her sisters in cinema that Hollywood makes so few movies starring women. In dollar terms, this gender myopia is defensible, since guy pictures do bigger business. This year, for example, all eight of the films that earned more than $100 million at the domestic box office are stories of "a man who ..." Or, in one case, "a male lion who ..."

But even the moguls realize that women's pictures often have a gentility, an expanse of emotion, absent from True Lies or The Mask. And, hell, somebody's got to fill those five slots for the Best Actress Oscar nominations. So come December, when the Oscar-qualification deadline looms, the women's club is allowed in. This month will see movies starring such divas as Susan Sarandon % (in two films), Jessica Tandy (two), Geena Davis, Sigourney Weaver, Anjelica Huston, Winona Ryder and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

On Oscar night they all may be applauding Foster. In Nell the two-time winner (for The Accused and The Silence of the Lambs) plays a North Carolina woodswoman who has grown up utterly isolated from the outside world. Now her only companion, her mother, has died, and Nell is a rich woman -- but still barely a girl. She speaks her own dialect, recoiling from the doctor (Liam Neeson) and the psychologist (Natasha Richardson) who would help her, use her, perhaps destroy her, and who will be forever touched by her innocent sorcery.

Already you hear echoes of Foster's own Little Man Tate, as well as E.T., The Miracle Worker, The Wild Child, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Forrest Gump and Green Mansions (the last with Audrey Hepburn memorably miscast as Rima the Bird Girl). Nell is a fable of emergence and transcendence. Written by William Nicholson and Mark Handley, from Handley's play Idioglossia, it illustrates the familiar movie moral that wounded creatures are powerful ones, with powerful lessons to teach those who would presume to educate them. It's humanism at its most Panglossian. But Michael Apted, who has directed vigorous woodland women before (Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter, Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist), focuses on the weird wonder of Foster. Of course her portrayal is a stunt; of course the viewer is aware of the distance between the actress and her role. Yet she undercuts cliche with a fearless, fierce, beautifully attuned performance.

Foster also produced the film, which surely would not have been made (not with this care and glamour, anyway) unless a powerful star had wanted it to be. It's the worthiest kind of vanity production, welcome in any movie season.