For years, it seemed the only person with the ability to make an all-live-action family movie was Steven Spielberg. He either directed or produced “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial”, “The Goonies”, “Back to the Future”, and “Men in Black”, while nearly everyone else was limiting themselves to kids-only or adults-only fare.

 

By Mitch Silver

 

For years, it seemed the only person with the ability to make an all-live-action family movie was Steven Spielberg. He either directed or produced “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial”, “The Goonies”, “Back to the Future”, and “Men in Black”, while nearly everyone else was limiting themselves to kids-only or adults-only fare.

The only exceptions were special-effects-based films like “Star Wars” and animated ones like “Toy Story”.

 

Then along came “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in 2001, and Hollywood figured there might be box-office gold in movies that adults and children could enjoy together. The latest of these crossover films is “Dolphin Tale”, a re-working of a true story.

 

In 2005, a 3-month-old bottlenose dolphin was found tangled in a crab trap on a particularly cold December day along Florida’s Gulf Coast. Named Winter, she was brought to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium-cum-animal-hospital. It soon became evident that her tail, crucially important for swimming, was too injured to save and it was amputated.

 

The dolphin learned to swim side to side, the way a fish or shark would, rather than with the up-and-down motion natural to its species. She couldn’t swim as fast or jump as high as most dolphins, but the real problem was that she was slowly damaging her spine and developing scoliosis.
Kevin Carroll, one of the world’s leading prosthetists, thought he might be able to build the animal an artificial tail and drove down from Orlando to meet Winter. “We felt that by fitting her with a prosthetic device, we could get her swimming in an anatomically correct manner again.”

 

Here’s where fiction diverges from fact. Instead of working at a VA hospital helping injured soldiers, Carroll was part of an orthopedic group that did, in fact, make animal prosthetics, though never one for a dolphin.

 

Carroll described the challenge. “Human skin is fragile, but I can scratch my nail across my skin and in a couple of minutes that mark is gone,” he says. “But if I put that same mark on the dolphin’s skin, six weeks later I’d come back and that mark would still be there.” And the tail would need to attach to that skin.

 

Played by Morgan Freeman, the orthopedist makes repeated attempts to attach an artificial tail to the injured mammal. Playing herself in a bravura performance, Winter rejects one tail after another, and things become desperate for her and her caretakers, who are on the brink of foreclosure.

 

In a parallel story, an 11-year-old boy (Nathan Gamble) convinces his mom (Ashley Judd) that he should hang out at the aquarium all summer and help the family that owns it provide the 24/7 care Winter requires (Kris Kristofferson is the granddad, Harry Connick Jr. is the widower-father, and Cozi Zuehlsdorff is his daughter, with Frances Sternhagen along for the ride as the outside head of the non-profit’s Board). Meanwhile, his swimming champion cousin Kyle (Austin Stowell) is injured while serving in the military and comes back to be treated by … you guessed it: Morgan Freeman.

 

Okay, full disclosure: my actress niece, Austin Highsmith, plays Winter’s chief handler, Phoebe, whose job in the picture is pretty much to walk Winter (or the rubber Winter used in a couple of the scenes) around the pool as therapy. Fuller disclosure: she did such a good job of acting, the Clearwater Aquarium has offered her a full-time job.

 

Fun fact: this may be the only time two people named Austin were in the same movie together, one male and one female.

 

The film gets its power from two elements: wonderful views of a dolphin swimming underwater, and the parallel story of human and animal, each requiring a prosthetic device, and their mutual struggle to survive.

 

On the negative side, I can’t figure out why this movie is being shown in 3-D. The swimming sequences aren’t that good, and the climax, when Winter shows she’s managed to come through, is a little underwhelming. If you remember the ending of “Free Willy”, this is no “Free Willy”. What “Dolphin Tale” is, though, is the No. 1 box office movie in America.