White Bird In A Blizzard
Studio: Magnolia Pictures
Directed by Gregg Araki
Oct 23, 2014
Web Exclusive
The Connors look like a cookie-cutter American family sunk in suburban ennui. Patriarch Brock (Christopher Meloni) brings home the bacon while his beautiful wife, Eve (Eva Green), keeps the home; 17-year-old Kat (Shailene Woodley) hides out in her room listening to The Cure when she’s not hanging with punker friends or banging the handsome but slow-witted boy next door. Following weeks of erratic behavior, Kat’s mother disappears one afternoon without a trace. She and her father file a missing persons report with a sexy police detective (Thomas Jane), but years pass without answers and Eve’s presence eventually fades from their lives.
Somewhere beneath all of the stylized dream sequences, overwrought voiceover, painfully on-the-nose dialogue and disjointed flashbacks, White Bird In A Blizzard has the setup for a great mystery. However, the film seems too preoccupied with Kat’s sexual awakening – with her teenage boyfriend, and later with Jane’s loose-moraled police detective – to be bothered with searching for the missing Eve Connors. As Kat stops caring about her mother’s whereabouts, so does the viewer; her hormone-driven angst is far too standard fare to fill in these lulls in the plot. (It also doesn’t help that Woodley’s love scenes with Thomas Jane feel so uncomfortable and, well, statutory.) There is absolutely no sense of danger at any point in White Bird, and for that matter, there’s little urgency at all to answering what should have been the story’s primary question. Little of that matters, anyway: most of the audience should be able to accurately solve the mystery (save for one dumb, unearned twist) halfway into the film. So heavily is the ending foreshadowed that even other characters in the film call Kat out for not figuring it out herself earlier on.
It’s a shame to see Shailene Woodley’s mature turn wasted in a film like this, but the young leading lady is given far more to work with than her co-stars. Christopher Meloni and Thomas Jane, in particular, do as much as they can with their one-note characters. (It’s more sad than anything to see Gabourey Sidibe relegated to a minor “sassy best friend” role.) On the other end of the spectrum lies Eva Green, whose woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown had the potential to be the film’s most layered character, but whose performance is so overblown and crazy-eyed it approaches camp. In a film made of mostly solid performances despite limited material, Green makes you cringe with almost every scene she’s in.
One positive note is the soundtrack, with new music by former Cocteau Twin Robin Guthrie and collaborator Harold Budd; it’s only a pity that these dreamy tracks must score such tedium.
www.magpictures.com/whitebirdinablizzard
Author rating: 2.5/10
Average reader rating: 1/10
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