Film Review | ‘Bird’ Is an Adolescent Flight Above the Mean Streets
Acclaimed Director Andrea Arnold’s New ‘Bird’ Tells a Gritty Yet Uplifting Tale About a 12-Year-Old’s Life
Barry Keoghan in 'Bird' | Credit: Robbie Ryan
Fans, present company included, of Andrea Arnold’s remarkable documentary Cow — a close-up portrait of a particular cow headed for a meat industry demise — should be duly alerted: her fascinating new film Bird is not a doc about aviary life. A more apt point of comparison is Arnold’s moving film American Honey, in which gritty, mean, street-ly lives of young characters deftly juggle edgy and dangerous lives with ultimately heartwarming resolutions. These films’ happy endings are hard-won, but won nonetheless.
In Birds, one of the inaugural films being screened at the new SBIFF Film Center (former Fiesta 5), birds figure into the narrative as emblems of mystical escapism and vehicles of deliverance in a film which manages to blend realism with flights of magic realism and transcendence. Birds of a mythical sort offer dreamy relief and literal rescue in the film’s chronicle of the tough-but-still-innocent 12-year-old Bailey (in a stirring, award-worthy performance by young Nykiya Adams), in a tenement region of Kent, England.
Even in her just pre-teen state, Bailey is cold and self-protective, presumably hardened by past experiences we aren’t entirely clued in about. Contrasting her daily frictional life of an evil stepfather and friends entangled in drug dealings and other ambiguous criminality, she meets an eccentric elf-like character named Bird (German actor Franz Rogowski), with a skirt and a cleft palate voice. They find common ground in his search for his real father, as she’s trying to stitch together the shards of her fragmented family.
A funny thing happens when we now see the likes of Barry Keoghan on the screen, so memorable are his cunning and bloodthirsty roles in Killing of a Sacred Deer and Saltburn (though he leans into sweeter, loopier airs in The Banshees of Inisherin). From our first nerve-rankling encounter with Keoghan — as Bailey’s flighty father, trying to win his daughter’s approval of a new wife-to-be — we reflexively expect dark and possibly violent turns to unfold. Yet his underlying goodness and love for his children prevail, despite the gruff acid-tongued surfaces and drug-world links (including possession of a coveted hallucinogenic-triggering toad).
The visual language for Bird, via cinematographer Robbie Ryan, charts a smart course between indie roughness and polish, in keeping with the delicate thematic balance of peril and hope. Without calling undue attention to itself, the naturalistic visual elan entails handheld camera and smoother stylization mixed with artful fly-in shots for atmosphere and vertical cell-phone-style format. Recurring footnote imagery of butterflies, emblematic of fragile and desired-for innocence, blend with an ominous raven overhead — and ultimately directly in the magic realist mix.
This Bird flies, with determination and grace.
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