‘Bird’ Review: Andrea Arnold’s Disappointing Shift Into Magical Realism [Festival du Nouveau Cinéma 2024]
Andrea Arnold turns her social realist lens into a magical one with Bird and fails at drawing any meaningful arcs on its central characters despite a constantly assured stylistic touch.
Some critics will often say that one specific element sinks an entire picture or that “when it reaches the third act, the movie no longer works.” However, and more often than not, movies don’t have well-defined ‘acts' and that attempting to structure any motion picture into three distinct sections sets up a failed formal analysis. Some will argue otherwise, because that’s what we’re all taught in film school and begrudgingly accept it as an objective fact. However, when filmmakers like Pablo Larraín present a movie in ‘three acts’ and immediately break the notion of how an ‘act’ should operate inside his film with Maria, one has to think differently about how movies are shaped beyond academically safe notions. More often than not, screenwriters don’t think about ‘acts,’ but the thematic essence of their project that will ultimately guide how they will shape the material they want to treat.
This is often true with the social cinema of Andrea Arnold, which never adopts what scholars refer to as a ‘three-act’ structure and instead plunges us into fully realized, humanist worlds. A handheld aesthetic immerses us into the frequently dark but ultimately life-fulfilling stories of its protagonists, opening ourselves up to a newfound perception of what being alive in this dreary planet we live in could be. The final scene of 2016’s American Honey remains the purest representation of her directing style, allowing its actors to naturally inhabit the environment she represents with an almost first-person camerawork that always puts the audience at the front and center of the adventure.
With Bird, her latest film, Arnold makes a massive shift near its conclusion (and not a ‘third act’ as some would be inclined to think) that, yes, completely sinks her proposition. She introduces us to our protagonist, Bailey (Nykiya Adams), in the same fashion as her previous fiction works, with her famous handheld camera immersing us in its impoverished rural town (though, in this case, intercut by digitized videos shot on Bailey’s cellphone that hints at how she perceives life). Bailey’s father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), is absent for most of her life, and she resents him for leaving his mother (Jasmine Jobson) behind and marrying a girl he’s only known for three months (played by Frankie Box).
They live in the same household with her brother, Hunter (Jason Buda), but barely have a connection with one another. Instead, Bailey connects with Bird (Franz Rogowski), a lost human searching for his long-lost family after he was abandoned by them. Of course, ‘Bird’ is a metaphor for an actual bird, whether in the constant inserts of the animals or in finding locations where Bird-like bodies of water are framed within Robbie Ryan’s impeccable lens. The symbolism is unsubtle, and the storytelling itself is also treated in the same vein.
Bird is a literal (human) manifestation of someone who lost his pack and is trying despreately hard to reunite with it, after spending so many years alone, fending for himself. One could look at his physicality and believe he’s a child trapped in a grown man’s body, having never found his wings to pursue living alone. This allegory is easy to grasp, and the audience quickly associates Bailey’s quest as wanting to ‘fly away’ from the meaningless life she’s living as a neglected tween with someone who will allow her to find her wings in the next stage of her life.
In this case, Bird focuses on the transition from adolescence into adulthood (more aptly, this is about childhood to adolescence). Arnold uses the figure of Bird as the only person who can tell Bailey to use her newfound wings to find purpose in a childhood that has never rewarded her and her birth mother, who is now stuck in an abusive, rather deadly relationship with Skate (James Nelson-Joyce). And for a while, the metaphor is rooted in reality and easily perceptible. There’s a splash of fantasy within how Bird presents himself to Bailey, but it never strays too far away from the tangible, textured photography Arnold puts forward with Ryan.
As such, we’re quickly drawn into Bailey’s story. Her plight feels so steeped in melancholy that it’s hard to become attached to her as she, in this case, figuratively finds her wings. Adams is a total revelation in this movie, possibly the best breakout role I’ve seen in an Arnold picture. As the film begins to drift into a completely different proposition than what Arnold has laid out throughout her runtime, Adams’ performance never changes. It’s always rooted in a deep naturalism that instantly pops off the screen, whether from her profoundly human interactions with Bird or her fearlessness in standing up to her neglectful father (Keoghan is also terrific, in a surprisingly restrained turn) and her mother’s dangerous boyfriend.
But as the movie begins to tap into much darker territory, such as a scene where Bailey directly confronts Skate, the most harrowing (and violent) sequence of the film, Arnold shifts its social realist story into a magical one and completely tarnishes the slow, but intriguing relationship between Bailey and Bird. The movie then becomes a quasi-sequel to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman and loses all of the realism and stark human drama that made the movie somewhat compelling to watch. She didn’t have much to say about Bailey, Bug, or Bird in its first hour or so, but it was at least building towards something true and powerful.
However, this change in tone and atmosphere renders all of its impactful drama meaningless. it feels as if Arnold didn’t have anything to say about Bailey or Bird at all. Looking at how it concludes, the metaphor feels, of course, obvious but isn’t as thrilling or revelatory as one might think. When Arnold was rooting her story inside Bailey’s daily life, it wasn’t as inspired as some of her previous films, but it had the anchor of Adams and Keoghan. They’re both terrific to watch and the natural dialogues they share rank high among some of the most soulful of the year. However, one can’t say the same about Rogowski, who seems woefully miscast despite his intriguing physique and demeanor in representing Bird’s path to individuality and reconnection with his long-lost family. That doesn’t mean his performance isn’t filled with poignancy, but it eventually loses itself when it reaches an unwarranted conclusion that was never primed to the audience when Arnold steeps the world of her film in pure realism.
But the movie isn’t a complete loss, especially in how Arnold takes a (justified) jab at Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn by referencing Keoghan’s naked dance of Murder on the Dancefloor during the movie. While this critic still enjoys the perverted pleasures of Fennell’s follow-up to 2020’s Promising Young Woman, the thought of her latest project, a desecration of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights for the TikTok generation, makes me violently ill. This is especially true when Arnold delivered not only the most remarkable adaptation of Wuthering Heights to the screen but also one of the best-ever book-to-film translations we’ve currently seen.
Arnold is unashamed and rightfully angry at the thought of disrespecting Brontë’s work like this (first, by casting a white dude as Heathcliff, after Arnold corrected decades of on-screen misinterpretation by having a multiracial actor play him, just like how Brontë described him in the book). Perhaps it was a slightly unintentional bit and I’m grasping at straws. However, Arnold’s adaptation of the book is so visceral in its understanding of Brontë’s text that no filmmaker, past or present, could ever match Arnold’s uncompromising vision of finally getting to the heart of Wuthering Heights.
But it’s also where Bird feels more or less like a parody of Arnold’s previous (strong) works than a film with tangible meaning, both in its stark visuals and illustrative storytelling. As it ends with an entirely different movie than the one we were watching just fifteen minutes ago, one has the impression that, after treating with social realist, urgent stories ever since the release of Wasp, Arnold doesn’t have much to say anymore. She needs to look into new ways to capture life on film, but the current state of affairs isn’t as compelling as giving us deeply human characters to care for in profoundly realistic and relatable stories. One thing she does well consistently is never operate her movies in ‘acts,’ as most will describe the movie through that lens. Still, Bird’s tonal shift puts this notion at the forefront of her picture that perhaps movies don’t have ‘acts’ after all. That could be something worth thinking about.