Bookworm: Parenting a dad, chasing a panther

This charming New Zealand film is about absent fathers, precocious children, reverse parenting, magic and a mythical (or maybe real) black panther.

Elijah Wood and Nell Fisher in Bookworm.

The charming New Zealand film Bookworm is about absent fathers, precocious children, reverse parenting, magic and a mythical (or maybe real) black panther.

What happens when you head to the other side of the world to meet your 11-year-old daughter for the first time? What happens when you first meet your 42-year-old father and realise he’s the one who needs parenting?

These are some of the questions asked in this thoughtful, entertaining, humorous comedy-drama directed by Ant Timpson, written by Toby Harvard and filmed in NZ’s beautiful MacKenzie Region.

Mildred (impressive child actor Nell Fisher) is the 11-year-old bookworm of the title. She’s super smart and speaks like an over-educated adult, which real adults find a little intimidating.

When her mother (Morgana O’Reilly) is hospitalised after a household accident, her American father turns up at the doorstep. Strawn Wise (Elijah Wood) has long hair, a beard and is dressed in black, down to his nail polish.

He is an illusionist; not a magician as “that sounds cheap”. He used to have a television show but that was cancelled and now he earns a living doing children’s birthday parties.

Wood, who worked with the director and screenwriter on the 2019 black comedy Come to Daddy, grows into the role. “People need magic in their lives and I do my best,’’ he tells his ­daughter.

The Canterbury Panther, “our Bigfoot”, comes into play as there is a $NZ50,000 reward for anyone who can produce video evidence of its existence. Nell’s mother is deeply in debt. So this illusion of a father and his booksmart daughter join forces to track down the panther.

“I’m what’s commonly referred to as a brutal realist,’’ she advises him. He suggests she’s a ­realist who believes in an urban legend. Strawn is a bush virgin who is scared of everything. When he hears a “creepy” sound during the night he wakes his 11-year-old daughter. Mildred knows everything, but by reading rather than ­experience.

She is a child who realises she has to parent her parent. Though there’s a chance he will surprise her. There are gentle confrontations and connections between the two.

In one of the best scenes, Strawn opens up about his friendship and falling out with the magician David Blaine. When his daughter asks what he did, he replies, “What I always do when I see something scary. I ran off, as fast as I could and as far as I could”.

She is smart enough to draw the parallel, and there will soon come a time in the NZ wilderness where her father will find himself facing something scary.

The plot has two turning points. The first involves the black panther which may or may not exist. The second involves Strawn and Nell being robbed. These moments take the father-daughter relationship to some honest places.

“I just want you to tell me the truth,’’ Nell says when her father first arrives and tries to impress her with a card trick.

By the end of this film, he does have to face some personal truths, as does she.

Bookworm (PG)

103 minutes

In cinemas from August 29

★★★½

Keeping a language alive with hip hop

Early in Kneecap, a baby is being baptised in the woods of Northern Ireland. Before the priest can wet his head, a police helicopter buzzes above and lights up the scene. The “peelers” think it’s an IRA meeting.

“I mean, what f..king chance did the wee boy have?’’ asks his future friend Liam Og O Hannaidh in a voiceover.

The wee boy is Naoise O Caireallain. His father, Arlo (Michael Fassbender, brilliant in a handful of scenes) is an Irish liberationist known for “blowing up anything British”.

In 2017 Liam and Naoise, best friends from childhood, founded, alongside music teacher JJ O Dochartaigh, the Irish hip-hop group Kneecap, which records its songs in the Irish language.

Kneecap, written and directed by British-Irish filmmaker Rich Peppiatt, in his feature debut, is the band’s origin story, with the three members playing loosely fictionalised versions of themselves.

It is a madcap, surreal (a lot of drugs are consumed), riot that at its heart is about the preservation of a mother tongue and, by extension, a mother country.

Naoise and Liam are drug dealers in West Belfast. JJ enters their lives when he is summoned to a police station as a translator. When he complains about being called in — “It’s not the potato famine” — his partner ­Caitlin (Fionnuala Flaherty) tells him not to joke about the famine. “Too soon?’’ he asks.

The police station scene, where Liam is interrogated in English and answers in Irish, is brilliantly scripted, as is the entire film, and humorous. It shows, as Arlo has told the boys since they were tots, that “every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom”.

During the interview, JJ reads from Liam’s notebook, in which he finds drugs and lyrics. From the latter, Kneecap is born, with the frequent use of the former. The drug and alcohol-fuelled scenes where the trio records and performs will make you think your bad night out wasn’t so bad after all.

Naoise and Liam are “ceasefire babies”. “Maybe we were always going to be only the moment after the moment,’’ Liam says. Kneecap, named after the IRA practice of shooting people in the knees, changes that.

As the band starts to make waves, a lot of people stand in its way. Detective Ellis (Josie Walker) investigates with some personal bias as her niece Georgia (Jessica Reynolds) is sleeping with Liam. “I’m going to blow you like a Brighton hotel,’’ the Protestant tells her Catholic lover.

The Radical Republicans Against Drugs are unsettled and even Caitlin, a leader of the push to preserve the Irish language, thinks the Kneecap trio are “bad ambassadors”.

Arlo, meanwhile, faked his own death a decade ago and is in hiding. His “widow” Dolores (Simone Kirby) has not left the house since. When Arlo does appear it is with passionate purpose, for Northern Ireland first, his son second. There’s a deft reference to IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, who Fassbender plays in Steve McQueen’s 2008 film Hunger.

The obvious influence on this movie is Danny Boyle’s 1996 comedy-drama Trainspotting, based on the 1993 novel by Irvine Welsh. The director deploys nose-cam to capture cocaine snorting and uses claymation to show what the world looks like when ketamin is mistaken for coke.

Such techniques are used well and sparingly. Overall this highly original film is about liberation, of an indigenous language and of the people who speak it. As Caitlin puts it: “A country without a language is only half a nation.”

Kneecap (MA15+)

English and Irish languages with English subtitles

105 minutes

★★★½