‘Dolphin Tale” is a reasonably uplift ing kids movie if you don’t think about it too much. I get paid to think about things too much, and effective as the movie is, it nevertheless left me slightly put off.
This is the tale of a tail — Winter is a dolphin that washes up on a Florida beach tangled in a crab trap, the circulation cut off to its lower extremity. The adolescent who finds it, Sawyer (Nathan Gamble), learns from a marine vet (Harry Connick Jr.) whose daughter Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff) is about Sawyer’s age that Winter’s tail has to be amputated.
A dolphin can swim without a tail — but only by using a side-to-side wiggle that gradually destroys its spine. So this animal needs a prosthesis or it’ll die.
An animal lover myself, I nevertheless refer to Winter as “it” for a reason (though everyone in the film refers to the mammal as “she”). The dolphin is a charmer — may I call it slick? — and director Charles Martin Smith creates many tender, quiet moments, such as the one when Winter is discovered on the beach, forlorn, wrecked and seemingly destined for the nearest StarKist factory. That Winter is a real dolphin playing roughly its own life story adds an additional layer of poignancy — and, in the end, hope.
But dolphins aren’t as important as humans, are they? They’re especially not as important as, say, wounded military veterans returning home to discover they can no longer walk. I wouldn’t bring up such a comparison — except the film does, drawing a strangely frivolous parallel between the dire condition of Winter and that of Kyle (Austin Stowell), Sawyer’s college-age cousin who is, like Winter, Sawyer’s soulmate and a champion swimmer who suffers a cruel injury.
We don’t learn where Kyle gets his battle wound, or what happened to him, except that it involved an explosion that caused nerve damage. He still has both legs, but one of them doesn’t work, and might be permanently disabled.
Kyle’s story is, in short, massively more important than whether a marine mammal lives or dies. So why is he kept in the background while everyone talks incessantly about Winter? Why must he endure an insulting snap-out-of-it speech from the local prosthetics guru (Morgan Freeman, doing a sort of “Sesame Street” take on his “Batman Begins” inventor)? Why, really, is he in this film at all?
Answer: for tearjerking purposes in support of that tearjerking porpoise. Once we’re all good and sad about everything that’s going wrong, the movie can begin the big heal. I don’t think wounded veterans of ongoing overseas wars should be used in quite this facile a manner, nor am I persuaded that little kids need to be exposed to such heavy themes, but this is a film from Alcon Entertainment, the producer of “The Blind Side,” which is not shy about going for the waterworks.
Both kids have lost a parent (Sawyer’s dad ran away; Hazel’s mom died), and in another scene, a little girl with one leg visits Winter, saying, “She’s just like me.” From her, Sawyer gets the idea that Winter is a celebrity whose fame can be used for fund-raising. Note which way the aid direction points: He doesn’t say, “Gee, maybe we can use Winter to give comfort to little kids with disabilities.”
Earlier, there’s an even more blatant episode of pandering. The boy drops out of summer school with the blessing of his mom (Ashley Judd), on the theory that he’ll learn more at the dolphin hospital than at a remedial grammar class. This would have been an excellent opportunity to tell Sawyer that work is the price we pay for hobbies, and if he hopes to be a marine biologist, he’s going to need to master grammar and a lot of other rigorous classes.
As it is, he’s failing everything and seems poised to someday hold the title of minimum-wage chum-bucket assistant at SeaWorld.