Review of The World's Fastest Indian (2005) by Markb. — 13 Mar 2006

Writer-director Roger Donaldson's hugely affectionate, admiring portrait of New Zealand folk hero Burt Munro (Anthony Hopkins), a senior citizen who follows his dream to set the motorcycle land speed record at the Bonneville (Utah) Flats, zooms along a very simple path.

Munro charms New Zealand neighbors (including the ones next door whom he normally annoys with his noisy midnight tune-ups and unkempt lawn). Munro travels to USA and charms everyone he meets. (Well, almost everyone.

) Munro makes it to Bonneville and charms all the other racers. Munro...well, you get my drift, but chances are excellent that while you're actually watching the movie, you either won't notice how prdictable much of it is or you'll be smiling too much to care.

Transport Rocky Balboa to the other side of the globe, set the time machine back to the early 1960s, saddle him with a neverending series of financial obstacles and health problems (to say nothing of the title vehicle, a 1920 model kept alive and roaring with equal amounts of tinkering and TLC), and you've got this ceaselessly delightful tribute to Munro's can-do spirit.

It's a real comeback for Donaldson, Munro's talented countryman who, after doing the powerful, promising domestic drama Smash Palace in his homeland, traveled stateside and, following a few respectable productions like The Bounty (an account of the famous mutiny featuring Hopkins' evenhanded, everyone-has-his-reasons interpretation of the notorious Captain Bligh) sunk deeper and deeper into the mire, churning out some of the worst junk of the 1980s and 90s (Cocktail, White Sands, the original Species and the Basinger-Baldwin remake of Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway).

His Bay of Pigs historical drama Thirteen Days was a few steps up (even if it DID imply that Kevin Costner solved the whole Cuban missile crisis by himself, with maybe a little help from President John F.

Kennedy), but Donaldson's deep and obvious love for his subject here appears to have bought him his soul back. After recently seeing Transamerica I complained that the road movie was, for the most part, an overused, moribund genre that needs to be gently put to rest.

..but Donaldson has made me eat my words. Munro's travels from Los Angeles to Utah work delightfully because Donaldson doesn't overplay his hand (even with the passenger who's involved in a new military adventure in a place called Vietnam).

..he just tells the story of a very nice man who meets a lot of different people and brings out THEIR internal niceness. Of course, it helps to build your movie around such an engaging central character whose effect on others is so readily understandable: Munro is a blissfully uncomplicated soul who's so comfortable within his own skin (it's mentioned repeatedly that he neither smokes nor drinks, but then he doesn't NEED to) that he effortlessly breaks down other people's defenses.

(In more ways than one, too: he gets two extremely attractive older women into bed--or more probably, they get HIM into bed--and I strongly suspect that some of the younger ladies at Bonneville would've happily given him a go if they hadn't had husbands or boyfriends around.

) Although not as prolific a year for screen biographies as 2004 was, 2005 certainly had its share of good ones: I'm as big a fan of Walk the Line and Good Night, and Good Luck as most (and slightly less of one on Capote, a somewhat sluggishly directed film powered mostly by spectacular performances), but the two that resonated the most with me--now and I'm sure years from now, too--were The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio, about 1950s housewife and contest winner Evelyn Ryan, who juggles a houseful of kids and a reprobate husband, and this.

I'm completely convinced that both movies, dealing as they do with hugely appealing, plucky and uncomplicated individuals who repeatedly beat the odds with great mental toughness, would've been tremendous word-of-mouth populist hits (and garnered Hopkins and Prize Winner star Julianne Moore Oscar nominations that I thought they were completely robbed of) if the producers had only done the Oprah circuit a la My Big Fat Greek wedding rather than relegated them to big-city arthouses.

(Nearly everyone I know who saw either or both films loved them.