  Abigail Breslin as the stranded young girl Nim is the only character with brains on the poorly produced Nim's Island.
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Jodie Foster was named one of the 50 smartest people in Hollywood in an entertainment magazine poll last year. That list just might have to be revised after her performance in Nim's Island.
She plays a mentally unbalanced, obsessive-compulsive author who writes adventure books. She uses her own name -- Alex Rover -- for her male alter ego. He does everything she cannot. Male Rover tackles the world. Female Rover won't leave her own house. Until a distress message arrives from a little girl on a remote Pacific island. Off she goes on a rescue mission.
Only an idiot would have taken that role without the necessary talent for slapstick that Nim's Island required. Foster -- in singular, spectacular fashion -- demonstrates her lack of that specific weapon in her actor's arsenal. What was the poor girl thinking?
Nim's Island debuts on DVD tomorrow in separate full and widescreen editions, each with a modest lineup of bonus materials. Those include three making-of featurettes and two commentaries, one of them from co-writers and co-directors Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, who brought Wendy Orr's novel to the big screen. The other commentary teams Foster with her pre-teen co-star, Abigail Breslin.
Both co-stars have an Oscar connection. Breslin was nominated as best supporting actress for Little Miss Sunshine (2006). Foster was nominated four times. The first, like Breslin, was as a child star when she earned a nom as best supporting actress for Taxi Driver (1976).
As an adult actor, Foster has burnished her reputation by getting nominated three more times, all as best actress: The Accused (1989), The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Nell (1994). She won twice, missing only on Nell.
So it is amazing to watch Nim's Island and see Foster get her ass kicked in the acting arena by Breslin, who is still only 12 years old. Whatever pleasures there are in this mediocre movie, it starts and ends with Breslin.
The adults played by Foster and Gerard Butler -- who has a double role as Breslin's smart but clueless dad and as the fictional Alex Rover who appears to Foster in her addled imagination-- are lame beyond belief. Meanwhile, other adults in the the movie are just weird or repulsive.
A few notes on Butler. As Nim's dad, he is supposed to be a marine biologist but he conjures up a fanciful tale of a whale who swallows a boat whole. He cites "a great blue whale" as the perpetrator of this deed.
Blue whales, despite being the largest living creatures on the planet, are baleen feeders. That means they sieve out tiny plankton and fish as they cruise through ocean waters. They could not chow down on a dighy, much less a boat. So Butler's character is not only an irresponsible father -- he leaves his daughter stranded on the island when he is lost at sea -- but he is a dolt in his own scientific field.
Hmmmm, maybe there is a pattern here. Foster's character acts like an idiot -- and she was stupid to play her -- while Butler's character is an idiot. Breslin's character is the smartest one on screen and she turns in the best performance.
