Cheap Nell (DVD) (Jodie Foster, Liam Neeson) (Michael Apted) Price

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Customer Reviews of Nell

Beautiful movie
This movie was beautiful to me because it brings messages that speak to a certain group of people. Individuals that look for something "funny" in those that are different ("funny" as in to make fun of rather than laughing because something is humorous) won't get the message. If you sometimes wonder if this life is all there is, Nell might have a lot of inspiring notions for you.

No, it's not an entirely perfect movie. I would have liked having some more details regarding May, and perhaps a little more background on the mother. However, if you think it was a flop then I'd like to see you take this subject matter and improve on it. The language in itself was pulled off beyond belief. I thought it was dramatically brilliant. Jodie Foster is amazing and exceptionally believable.

I disagree with some comments I see here regarding the final speech. I think that her more "educated" sounding phrasing in the courtroom show that Nell is learning from what's going on around her, and that's entirely believable. Just because she was in a trancelike state doesn't mean she wasn't taking things in prior to the court session. She's not a dumb girl at all, and I thought her deep hearted message proved that she is not autistic or retarded. Think about it. She's like a blank canvas. If you can't believe that something like that can happen, then I haven't any way to convince you. I believe it can.

Beautifully done. She should have won that academy award.

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Performances good, but plot just doesn't ring true
This 1994 film stars Jodie Foster as Nell, a young woman living alone in a remote area of North Carolina. She seems retarded at first until we realize that her mother was a stroke victim and she experienced an emotional trauma in childhood. This has resulted with her developing her own private language. When the good doctor played by Liam Neeson discovers her, he wants to keep her from the psychologists who want to hospitalize and study her. The court gives him three months to observe her in the wild, and he is joined by Natasha Richardson, a graduate psychology student, to do this observation.

Jodie Foster's performance is outstanding. The audience cannot understand her language but her emotions are clear. As the film evolves, however, we do understand some of her words as she gradually learns to speak English. There's a subplot of a romance between the doctor and the psychology student and a few bad guys including a journalist who wants to expose her to the world. And yes, the cinematography is fine.

However, the story does not ring true, not one bit. There are too many holes in the plot and a contrived silly ending. Specifically, we never understand how Nell manages to survive. We see her dancing naked in the moonlight but never see her looking for food or chopping wood or doing any of the thousands of things necessary to live all alone in a rural area. The film is also too long and the pacing slow. I just couldn't stop thinking of all the opportunities the writer of the screenplay missed to make the story believable.

Unless you're a particular Jodie Foster fan and want to see an outstanding performance, I can't recommend this video. In spite of its ambitions, it just doesn't make it

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Painfully cliche; unintentionally hilarious
Nell is a clunky drama about two psychologists (Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson) who study and befriend a young woman Nell (Jodie Foster) at her lakeside log cabin. A product of potentially disturbing family circumstance that this film promptly glosses over, Nell speaks her own language and was raised basically without civilization. Of course, Nell proves to everyone in a bombastic climactic courtroom scene that she is in fact more civilized than so-called modern society. She frankly states in 'nellish' that modern men and women don't look each other in the eye, avoid genuine communication, and possibly every other unoriginal complaint about contemporary society. Yet, it all seems a bit absurd since Nell is clearly an ideal product of such a society- she's compliant, fun-loving, clean with Aryan good-looks, and can even play matchmaker! When she hooks up her doctors, the movie officially becomes about Neeson and Richardson gettin-it-awwwn and loses any facade of insight into the human condition. Whatever it had was facile to say the least though as it ignores the scary, violent, sexual, and basically id-centric depths of human nature. Time and time again, Nell comes across like a domesticated pet- one that desperately needs to be put down.