Review: 'Water Horse'

The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep is mythology at its very best. In it, the Loch Ness monster takes center stage in a tale set on a country estate in Scotland during World War II. Little Angus MacMorrow (Alex Etel) is "confused," according to his mother Anne (Emily Watson), because he hasn't accepted that his father died in the war; Angus awaits his beloved father's return.

During this wait, a regiment of soldiers and a new handyman land on the doorstep of the manor house of which his mother is head housekeeper and bring World War II to the child's everyday life. They pull him out of the past and future and squarely into the brutal present of selfish, self-centered adults who see him less as a little boy than as a problem to be solved or put by for another time.

Angus doesn't mind, though, because he's not eager for their attention. He's got to look after the Water Horse, which he names Caruso. This is the sea creature that hatched from a huge egg he found while scavenging along the shore at low tide. Angus does all he can to nurture this rapidly-growing and voracious being, eventually drawing his sister and handyman Lewis Mowbray (Ben Chaplin) into his confidence. Caruso becomes proof positive that the imagination--the love child of a soul that wills itself to survive whatever the circumstances--can prevail over the petty cruelties and otherwise inane actions of adults who have forgotten to love the world around them.

So mighty is this being that he will be seen by other soldiers and otherwise skeptical adults. If Caruso is a metaphor for the capacity of Angus to create, recreate, and mediate his world, he is also very much part of the shared reality all in this tiny village of experience.

Caruso becomes the key to spiritual, emotional, and psychological freedom. No wonder even the meanest of soldiers can't help but see him in the end.

After the movie, a little red-haired boy who happened to be in the ladies' room with his mother told me the only problem with the movie is that the real Loch Ness monster is way bigger than Caruso. Of course, I thought. How big is the imagination, after all?

"I guess the people who made the movie wanted him to fit on the screen," I said.

"He's way bigger, though--way," the little boy said.

Way, indeed.