Bird
Writer director Andrea Arnold, eight years ago, put her kitchen-sink British austerity style and took it to the US for American Honey, a film about a wolf pack of kids in a van who were like the 21st century’s walking embodiment of chaos. It was an indie explosion that felt like a landmark hip-hop Dardenne brothers, I called it. Now she’s back to miserable young Brits adrift in nowhereville in Bird, the first dramatic feature she’s made since (she directed episodes of Big Little Lies and Transparent, and also made the documentary Cow in between). Forgive me for feeling like she left the party too early.
Arnold has long been a Cannes darling, she’s also been one of our critics’ darlings. So I’ll assume my reaction is out of step when I say that Bird doesn’t quite do it as a movie though it’s got her empathy and integrity all right (and her raw-boned craft), as well as a couple charismatic young movie stars in key roles.
One is Barry Keoghan, who carries himself differently now as an actor (he gives off the awareness that he thinks he might be a star). He plays Bug, who lives with his two kids in some kind of squatter flat in Kent not “lives” so much as “exists.” Bug doesn’t look after them at all; what he does do is get tattoos. His upper body is a menagerie: there’s a fly and spider inked on him somewhere (several wheres) up there already, but they’re small potatoes compared to what starts on his right cheekbone which I remind you is his face as an elaborate centipede that snakes down around his neck and presumably further south. The children just bug him.
One of them is Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who is twelve but seems older because she never smiles. I mean, yes, she’s sullen and hardened and wise beyond her years etc., but also her mouth is just set in a line. Bailey’s mother lives across town above a drug den (what fun) with a boyfriend who is (of course) an angry abuser of the violently psychotic type. Arnold follows Bailey around for quite a while, many scenes of the camera tracking her over this wire mesh bridge, etc. doing all that indie rock Dardenne stuff to show us how much of a stray she is by capturing her in movement like that the film also shows us her phone videos, mostly footage of birds, which she projects onto walls.
Bailey has braids on top of her head but at one point she gets annoyed and cuts them off so now she looks even more stoic and forlorn than before, also her half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda) belongs to some kind of vigilante youth gang whose leader wears a creepy mask when they terrorize local bad-rep people their punishments are arguably worse than their victims’ crimes (“Slice him!” says one).
There is a spot on earth, occasionally even an essential one, for a movie like “Bird,” which calls to mind early Arnold works such as “Fish Tank.” But my sense is that she’s mainlining neorealist glumness at this point. A showboat stunt of a performance by Keoghan (he’s supposed to be a terrible father but doesn’t seem like any kind of father) didn’t help. Nor did Bailey’s defiant hostility to Bug’s plan to marry his flame of three months (he will finance the wedding by selling a toad’s slime for its hallucinogenic properties), though it turns out he is about to become her stepbrother. She won’t even agree to put on a purple catsuit and be a bridesmaid and she’s 12. That’s independence taken to an unreal degree of precosity.
Bailey wanders into a field and meets another damaged sensitivity stranger in a skirt. Bird, played by Franz Rogowski, the German actor whose performance as the prima donna filmmaker in Ira Sachs’ “Passages” made him such a sociopath that he threw the movie out of whack. As characters go, Bird hails from the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. He’s sweet and kind, he looks like a crushed velvet version of Joaquin Phoenix crossed with Klaus Kinski, everything about him is delicate. Bailey and Bird become friends not because they are both magical children but because this is what happens in the film. Bailey helps Bird find his biological father (who wants nothing to do with him). And he helps her by well, let’s just say that he lives up to his name.
A gritty story of emotional poverty crossed with a fantasy-pal fairy tale? “Bird” will delight Andrea Arnold obsessives, but beyond them I’m not sure who it’s for or whether anyone should be for it. The film feels like Arnold trying to have the integrity of her severity and eat it too. A feel-bad movie that turns into a feel good movie, “Bird” never feels like a real movie.
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