Elderly businessman Michael Kingley (Geoffrey Rush), after the death of his daughter, hands over the company to his son-in-law, and he, as a businessman should, wants to start something bad, which will affect the territory of the Australian National Park with large nesting sites of birds. Michael's granddaughter, a young eco-activist Maddie, is trying to get her grandfather to do something about this. But he just makes a helpless gesture, they say, the company is no longer mine. Until a pelican suddenly appears outside his window in a storm, and he begins to remember his childhood on an island cut off from the world: a fishing father who fought off his aboriginal and three orphaned pelican chicks, whom little Michael saves from death ...
"My Friend Mr. Percival" (for once our translators have done a decent job with the title) is a remake of another Australian film "Boy and the Ocean" (1976) directed by Henry Safran.
Close family ties have been preserved with the original film: they were filmed in the same area, and the actor David Galpilil, who played a black aboriginal, appeared in a remake in a cameo of a wise shaman, the head of his tribe. The protests of the local population, defending their ancestral territories, to which the white man always came as an invader and robber, added a little momentum. The emphasis on the importance of understanding a foreign culture has been strengthened, however, the sensitive Safran reflected this in his film back in the 70s, long before the era of political correctness.
But the most important is the almost fairytale story of friendship between a boy and a big white bird. Anyone who watches the film will remember this scene first: the gray sea, wet sand and the silhouette of a child hugging a pelican by the neck, snuggling against it as a source of strength. The boy, nicknamed Stormick by the aboriginal, rescued the shriveled pink chicks who had suffered from the mindless cruelty of the hunters. And the bird, returning goodness a hundredfold, will save both the boy and his father, and our faith in the best at the same time.
In the 21st century, we are less and less likely to think about the fact that in nature it is possible to circulate not only evil, but also good, expelled from cinema into the territory of children's and family films; in adults, wherever you look, everywhere is some Yorgos Lanthimos with his murders of sacred deer, demanding retribution in human sacrifices. But there are still such reserves in the cinema, where the characters read "Lord of the Flies," but do not demand either retribution or retribution for the shed blood. Films in which people believe in goodness, as the best man on the planet, Nikolai Drozdov, believes, urging you to watch My Friend Mr. Percival.
We invite you to the pelican reserve of this touching film, where you will meet with the main national treasures of Australia: the unthinkable beauty of landscapes and the actor Geoffrey Rush, whose eternal cunning in his eyes does not allow him to seem too wise and enlightened in old age (excessive enlightenment annoys). "My friend Mr. Percival" is good for the soul.
And if you do not listen to us, then you must obey Nikolai Drozdov.