Penguin Bloom: Glendyn Ivin’s Drama, Starring Naomi Watts (Toronto Fest 2020)

Naomi Watts in ‘Penguin Bloom,’

Hugh Stewart

My Oscar Book:

Glendyn Ivin’s Penguin Bloom, an acquisition title that stars Oscar nominee Naomi Watts, had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Fest, aiming at not only finding a distributor but also becoming a part of a most unusual awards season.

The film stars Watts as the Bloom family matriarch who is partially paralyzed in a freak accident.

She subsequently bonds with a wounded magpie that one of her young sons (Griffin Murray-Johnson) brings home and nicknames ‘Penguin.’The low-budget Australian indie will be lucky to succeed at just the former, not because it isn’t perfectly sweet and well-acted, but because it is unclear who the audience would be for a movie that might have been pitched as Fly Away Home meets The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.Plenty of talented performers have been Oscar-nominated, and not infrequently won, for playing characters who are immobilized to one degree or another by injury or illness — from Daniel Day-Lewis for My Left Foot to Eddie Redmayne for The Theory of Everything.

Watts herself was previously nominated for playing a woman who was seriously injured while on a vacation with her young family, eight years ago for The Impossible.

Penguin Bloom: Glendyn Ivin’s Drama, Starring Naomi Watts (Toronto Fest 2020)

Naomi Watts in ‘Penguin Bloom,’

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