“Is it too real for you?” In the backdrop of Andrea Arnold’s latest film, “Bird,” 12-year-old Bailey rides through scenes of poverty in working-class Kent on his electric scooter with her shirtless, tattoo-covered father, Bugs.
The lyric question – courtesy of Irish post-punk band Fontaines DC – is an acute one for “Bird.” Arnold’s films are stark in their stark naturalism. His fiction films – this is his first in eight years – tend toward bleak, hand-held reality in the rugged locales of the real world. His last film, “Cow”, featured the story of a cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing spirits in spiritless environments, human and otherwise. The dream of something else is just out of reach. In “American Honey”, Starr finds peace only when she is submerged underwater.
In “Bird,” however, this sense of transcendent possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey wakes up in a field, where she encounters a strange man wearing a skirt who appears with a gust of wind like Mary Poppins. His name is Bird, he says. There’s a gentle sweetness to her that isn’t otherwise present in Bailey’s harsh and chaotic life.
At first she is suspicious of him, but he remains hidden, hovering like a henchman on the rooftops. He moves his neck repeatedly as if he is keeping an eye on Bailey. And he keeps an eye on her, helping Bailey navigate the difficult coming of age: her mother’s abusive boyfriend; His half-brother becomes caught up in vigilante violence; His father is marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has the ironic effect of breaking the spell that has marked Arnold’s best films. “Bird,” which opens in theaters Friday, like the writer-director’s vivid previous work, is a movie only she could make. Arnold has described it as the hardest thing he has ever made, and in “Bird” it is easy to appreciate his understanding of something that is ultimately out of reach. The uncomfortable effect of a strictly realist filmmaker turning towards magical realism is that not just parts of Rogowski, but the entire film, begin to seem inauthentic. Far from being “too real for you”, “The Bird”, with its in-your-face poverty and narrative extremes, never feels particularly real.
However, the most inconsistent part of “Bird” may not be the mysterious bird friend. Keoghan is a reliably arresting actor who feels out of place here. He doesn’t seem like a father in the slightest, and while that may be part of the issue, many other things about Bugs seem more performative than real. For starters, his plan is to use a toad’s hallucinogenic slime to afford his wedding. Add a few karaoke scenes and the sensation grows that “Bird” is less forced by its story than Arnold’s previous genre explorations.
“Bird” may go down as a rare miss for Arnold, but you can still see the keenness of his eye and the agility of his camera with his regular cinematographer Robbie Ryan. And this is never more true than when the camera is on Adams, a talent whose sad eyes say more than all the theatrics around her.
Mubi’s release “Bird” is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for “language throughout, some violent content and drug content”. Running time: 118 minutes. Two out of four stars.
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