Somebody’s cold one is givin’ me chills
As a kid, I sometimes took things apart, but I never had much interest in putting them back together. My preferred form of construction was less mechanical: I disappeared into movies and television, using other people's stories to put some distance between myself and whatever I didn't want to think about. Telling it that way now, I can't be sure how much of it is memory and how much is the shape I've given it over time. I can't relate to building a flying wagon, but I understand why Mike and Bobby need to believe one can fly — and why the man telling their story may need it even more than they did.
Bracco, fresh off GOODFELLAS, plays against every expectation her casting creates. You brace for someone hard enough to have survived Paulie Cicero's crew; instead, Mary is soft, hopeful, and repeatedly talked back into a marriage that's already put one of her children in a hospital bed. Her husband is the King to everyone in the house, a nickname that tells you almost everything about a man who needed one. The first promise comes at Bobby's bedside, after the King's arrest: "I promise this will never happen again." Not long afterward, while Mary is on the phone trying to prevent their truck from being repossessed, Bobby is the one reassuring Mike that the King is coming back and that "it's not Mom's fault." He returns on a temporary release to bury his mother, crying that he's changed, and Mary believes him again. The second promise arrives later in a quieter domestic scene — "It's gonna be different … I promise" — and by then the boys have learned to perform belief whether they feel it or not: "We believe you, Mom." "Yeah. We do." Wood is especially good as the watchful kid stationed beside something dangerous, a role he would return to in THE GOOD SON. There, Mark studies Henry because the adults can't see what he sees; here, Mike watches the King — and watches over Bobby — while the adults see enough and still fail to protect him. The sheriff's office sits only a building or two from their garage door. It's difficult to share Bobby's instinct to absolve his mother completely, even accounting for everything she's up against. There's a SOUTH PARK bit about divorced parents that crudely captures the hierarchy Mary's choices create: happiness and the new relationship first, the child somewhere after. Bobby is living the version without the joke.
The turtle isn't the throwaway gag he first looks like. He's found the day they discover the old clubhouse, having broken his own chain to climb inside. Shane's reaction makes them brace for worse, until Bobby stammers "it's a—" and Mike finishes it: "turtle." He gets named Samson on the spot, for exactly that strength, welcomed in as family. It plays as pure comedy in the moment. But Mike's note before the launch says they took "Samson and Shane, too," and in the framing scenes, when his own kids ask about their turtle, Mike pinkie-promises this is the same one — the only one of the three animals who survives into the present tense with a promise attached to him. Shane is the one whose stakes remain physical, at least for as long as the story keeps him in frame, and he's perfectly cast — those eyes do more acting than some of the humans in the frame. When he disappears and there's blood on the kitchen door, nothing in the dialogue explains what happened to him. He reappears for the final trip riding inside the Flyer rather than walking beside the boys, apparently hurt but alive, and Mike's note confirms that he went with Bobby too. The movie confirms his survival without explaining either the blood on the door or why he can no longer make the trip on foot.
The buffalo gets no such confirmation, ever. He's real at Geronimo Bill's roadside farm, where a boy asks if he might be the last buffalo left in the world, then he's a dream handing Mike a sense of purpose and a duty to protect Bobby — almost exactly the spirit-animal move THE SIMPSONS would later run with a talking coyote and a handful of insanity peppers — and finally he's reduced to a line in Bobby's postcard: "I scared the buffalo, flying too low." Promised, then lost from view, then never confirmed at all — the same widening gap between what happened and what got told that the ending runs on.
The film has its own excuse ready for anyone asking how a homemade wagon is supposed to fly, and it isn't aerodynamics. Every kid is born with seven great abilities and fascinations, the story goes, and loses them one by one on the way to adulthood — flight being the last and hardest to let go of. Fisher tried to hold onto his at fourteen, off a hill that would later carry his name, while his friends begged him to stop: "This is nuts, Fish. You're gonna get hurt." He didn't stop, and it went badly enough to become local legend before Mike and Bobby ever moved to the neighborhood. Even the boys argue about the legend before they've found the place. "He wasn't that great," Bobby says, until Mike pushes back and he overcorrects into some exaggeration of his own — the jump was off a barn, he insists, "probably two miles" down — before landing on his real verdict: "He probably did a good try. He just did it wrong." It's a kid's explanation, and a practical one. Bobby assumes Fisher failed because he made a mistake. The movie eventually settles on something stranger: Fisher simply waited too long. By fourteen, he'd already lost the seven great abilities.
They go looking for the hill anyway, and at "Fisher's Landing," where Fisher had made his own attempt ten years before they moved into the neighborhood, they try the same wager he lost. The film never pauses to acknowledge what this is — an adult giving a child pointers for a dangerous stunt — because Fisher isn't staged as a bystander who should know better. He's staged as a fellow believer, someone close enough to his own failure to root for a different outcome instead of stopping it. What Fisher offers Bobby from behind the gas pump, visibly marked by the same fall that made him a legend, is purely mechanical: ease off at the bottom, don't pull up, mind the angle, you'll stall. Nothing about abilities or fascinations. The film's own explanation for why Fisher failed and Bobby might not is mystical. The only actual expertise anyone in the movie offers is physics.
You could read the ending three ways, and the film leaves room for all three. Take the film at its word: the Flyer works, and the postcards that follow are proof of it, arriving — older Mike says — "every time I felt them slipping away," the seven great abilities and fascinations replenished right on cue, as if the universe knew exactly when he needed reassurance. Or take it sideways: "he grew up to be exactly what he was born to be: a flyer" is also a fair description of someone who never stops moving, who visits every place he ever dreamed of rather than stay anywhere long enough to be found — less a magical fulfillment than a very long way of running, the same thing LOST would later do to half its cast. Or take the physical ending at its most literal and least kind: the Flyer never leaves the ground, the King is hauled off for a charge the movie never bothers naming — even the supposedly real ending withholds its central fact — and the family simply goes home, the postcards a comfort older Mike invented because the actual ending wasn't a story he could tell.
The film doesn't adjudicate between these. Instead, it warns you that certainty isn't what Mike is offering when he turns to his own kids and asks if they finally understand what he meant about "history being in the mind of the teller." And when the moment comes to settle what happened to Bobby, the line he reaches for is "that's how I remember him" — which is a very different claim from that's what happened. The one apparent exception is Samson, and even that turns out to be less than it seems. Mike's children apparently have a turtle named Samson, but his connection to Bobby's flight exists only through Mike's pinkie-promise — the same kind of assurance Mary kept offering back when promises never seemed to hold.
Whoever RADIO FLYER was made for, it wasn't the children nominally invited to watch a story about a flying wagon — a PG-13 rating covers plenty of kid-marketed blockbusters too, but not many of them put a child in a hospital bed, whatever the poster promised. Columbia's marketing department couldn't figure out how to sell it either, spending $10 million promoting something that grossed only $4.6 million domestically against a reported $35 million budget. Critics couldn't agree on what they had seen. Roger Ebert wrote that the film "pushes so many fundamental questions under the rug" of its own screenplay; the Washington Post, reviewing the same movie, praised its "evocative texture" and how moving it found the brothers' bond.
Richard Donner later insisted that the ending means exactly what it shows, nothing cryptic — a claim that sits oddly beside his own studio's test screenings. One cut had adult Mike finding Bobby's Flyer hanging in the Smithsonian, which confused audiences; when that scene was removed, an intermediate version was left with Mike's voiceover narration but no onscreen adult Mike to establish who was telling the story. Donner finally took a day off from LETHAL WEAPON 3 to shoot the airfield framing scenes that open and close the finished film. The studio couldn't settle on its ending any more easily than the critics could settle on the movie.
THE SANDLOT runs the same basic trick — ordinary neighborhood objects and local legends inflated into myth by kids who need a mythology to organize their summer — but keeps the actual stakes safely inside the myth itself. Nobody's real life depends on whether the Beast is really a monster. RADIO FLYER uses the same structure and drops in a stepfather. ATONEMENT offers a closer comparison for the ending specifically, since it also ends with its storyteller admitting, in effect, that what we watched wasn't the whole truth — except ATONEMENT spells it out. Briony tells you directly that she gave her characters the ending reality denied them. RADIO FLYER approaches the same kind of confession and then pulls back, leaving the gap open rather than closing it.
BIG FISH is the version of this device that works most comfortably, and the difference is what's at stake in not knowing. If Edward Bloom's tall tales are exaggerations, the cost is a father turning out to be more ordinary than his stories made him. Either way, his life remains whole. If the Flyer never left the ground, the cost is a child who may not have gotten away at all. RADIO FLYER never fully earns the tenderness it borrows from stories in which uncertainty can be affectionate rather than horrifying.
The Flyer itself never quite convinces me. The need for it does. The boys' attempt to turn terror into escape remains moving even when the escape looks impossible. Mike may be preserving a miracle, disguising a loss, or doing both at once. I don't entirely believe the story he tells. I understand why he needs to tell it that way.
Final Verdict: 64 out of 100
