Review
White
Bird in a Blizzard
Director: Gregg Araki
Starring: Shailene Woodley, Eva Green, Christopher Meloni
Running time: 91 mins
Araki made
his name in the ’90s with the sex and drugs-fuelled “Teen Apocalypse Trilogy”
of Totally Fucked Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere. It was all good, transgressive,
Larry Clark-style fun but it wasn’t until 2004’s superb Mysterious Skin that
the writer/director really caught my eye. That film – based on a novel by Scott
Heim – told the story of two teenage boys both of whom had been sexually abused
by their school baseball coach. It dealt with how the assaults had warped the
lives of the pair and the wildly different ways they found to cope with it. I
saw the movie for a second time recently and not only did Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s
performance as a teenage rent-boy knock my socks off all over again, everything
else about it did too. To handle such perilous subject matter so sensitively
and artfully is a significant feat and the film should be far better known than
it is.
In its own
quiet way, White Bird in a Blizzard is every bit as dark – and almost as impressive
– as Mysterious Skin; a canny mix of whodunit thriller and coming-of-age drama.
Again based on a novel – this time by Laura Kasischke – it tells the story of Kat
Connor (Woodley), a bright and beautiful teenager living in small-town America
in the late-’80s/early-’90s. Despite appearances to the contrary, Kat’s life is
far from perfect. Her thick-as-a-brick boyfriend (“It’s a vicious circus”) has
suddenly lost all interest in sex and, worse still, her parents’ loveless
marriage comes to an abrupt end when mother Eve (Green) mysteriously vanishes
one day.
The story
is told partly in flashback as we become privy to the events leading up to the
disappearance; has unhappy alcoholic Eve grown so disillusioned she’s abandoned
her family, or are there more sinister reasons behind her exit? Araki teases
this question effectively throughout, mischievously wrong-footing you again and
again as he holds off on a definitive answer until the film’s final minutes.
Green is superb here – a growling, glowering study in stunted ambition and middle-aged
frustration. The kind of mean drunk who’d give Bette Davis in Whatever Happened
to Baby Jane? a run for her money.
That which
is hidden or missing looms oppressively over pretty much everything in the
film. Eve – like the white bird of the title – has disappeared but her identity
as a person seemed to dissolve the moment she married dullard husband Brock
(Meloni). She ceased to be herself, wasted her life (her words) and is now
jealous of the gorgeous young daughter blossoming as she withers. “I used to be
you” she tells Kat bitterly as her daughter preens semi-naked in front of the
bathroom mirror. It’s a similar idea to one explored in recent horror movie
Honeymoon – when you become a couple or marry, how much of yourself do you give
away? If White Bird is to be believed the answer is quite a bit.
With its
plucky but flawed teenage protagonist and '80s indie-rock soundtrack (The Cure, New
Order, and Siouxsie & the Banshees) you can see a bit of John Hughes’ DNA in
White Bird, while the film’s sinister secrets and mysteries evoke all manner of
“dark underbelly of suburbia” movies (Arlington Road, Blue Velvet, American
Beauty). However, Araki is smart enough as a writer and skilled enough as a
director to transcend his influences and mash-up different genres effortlessly.
Having no
interest in the mawkish delights of The Fault in our Stars, or YA fare like The
Hunger Games Divergent, Woodley is an actress who has remained off my
radar. And that has clearly been my loss because she lights up the film like a
firework display; a perfect mix of girl-next-door naïveté, wounded innocence and bad-girl
angst. Kat seems flatly unperturbed by her mother’s vanishing act at first –
maybe expecting the mercurial Eve to one day return as if nothing had happened
– but as she grows further into womanhood, the absence is keenly felt and
the mystery nags at her more and more. Perhaps Kat comes to realise she’s more
like Eve than she realises – her terrible romantic choices are testament to that.
Rating:
WWWW
White Bird
is a Blizzard is available now on VOD and DVD
Ratings
WWWW = Wonderful
WWW = Worthy
WW = Watchable
W = Woeful
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