Bird
Magic realism meets kitchen sink in Andrea’s Arnold’s latest fable, which confirms her talent but also her weaknesses.
Image courtesy of Mubi.
Born in Dartford in 1961, Andrea Arnold is now well established as a filmmaker who is a genuine artist. That is, of course, hardly surprising given that her first two films, 2006’s Red Road and 2009’s Fish Tank, both won prizes at the Cannes Film Festival. From the very beginning she showed remarkable directorial assurance and as her career has progressed she has repeatedly displayed a special ability to obtain first-class performances, especially from a series of young and inexperienced players. Kate Dickie was in that category taking her first leading role in Red Road and it applied too to Katie Jarvis as the teenager central to Fish Tank. Again, it was notable (if also unfortunate) that Solomon Glave and Shannon Beer as the young Heathcliff and Cathy in Arnold’s 2011 treatment of Wuthering Heights were so impressive that they quite overshadowed the actors playing them as adults. This particular talent is manifested once more in Bird. This new piece contains fine work by two notable actors, Franz Rogowski and Barry Keoghan, but no less impressive is 12-year-old Nykiya Adams in the role of an adolescent girl named Bailey who is pivotal to the story.
With Bird, Andrea Arnold continues to display her qualities aided by the involvement yet again of that superb photographer Robbie Ryan (he is a frequent collaborator) and by the adroit editing of Joe Bini. But for all Arnold’s abilities I have frequently had reservations about her work feeling that her judgment as a writer can be disappointing (of her past films I liked best Fish Tank and the documentary Cow but found Red Road veering into melodrama and American Honey too long by far). In the case of Bird, what I knew of it in advance sent out danger signals: much of Arnold’s work belongs to the school of gritty realism but I had read that this time around that element despite being retained would be merged with material best thought of as magical realism. Put it down to personal taste if you will, but my unease thus aroused increased when I realised that Bailey's father (Keoghan’s role) was named Bug and that the rather odd but unthreatening stranger encountered by Bailey in the countryside would be the Bird of the title (that’s Rogowski).
Despite approaching Bird with those doubts in mind I quickly found the film working far better than I had anticipated. With great confidence it introduces us to Bailey and to the household in which she lives (the location in Kent is well used). Bailey's birth had been the result of a teenage pregnancy and thus we find her living with Bug, a father hardly mature enough to be an effective and responsible parent. He is now living with Kayleigh (Frankie Box) and the impulsive, impractical Bug reveals to his daughter that he is marrying that week having met his bride only three months earlier. This surprise news irritates Bailey who, often left to her own devices, has an interest in nature. She takes pictures of birds and horses but also seeks to join her brother Hunter (Jason Buda) who is part of a youthful vigilante group which rejects her as being too young to be involved in their violence. Later we will meet Bailey’s mother Peyton (Jasmine Jobson) who lives elsewhere with her three younger children but who adds to Bailey’s concerns because Peyton has a new boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) who has a strong abusive streak.
All of this is presented realistically albeit with visuals that are distinctly colourful, a fact which, taken together with the film’s ability to capture an energy linked to enjoying the moment, provides a certain upbeat element to balance the darker aspects affecting the lives of these people. Then there's Bird, his odd rather fey manner never overplayed, who seeks to help Bailey even as she bonds with him by aiding him to track down his father (he claims to have lived elsewhere but to have come from this community without any clear knowledge about his parents). But, if one is aware that realism is far from being the whole story here, it is easy to sense that Bird is more than just another character in the tale. At one point his presence echoes the stance of a bird nearby, he has a strange propensity to appear on a rooftop as his abode of choice and, of course, there’s always the fact that he introduces himself as Bird.
Since this is all done with skill one is ready to accept the two levels involved even if when a climax is reached Bird’s startling contribution to it is presented almost too abruptly to encourage us to accept what we see. But as it turns out the real problem with the writing lies elsewhere. Not least because of the film’s chosen title one feels that Rogowski’s Bird and his interaction with Bailey should be the key focus. But, rather than shaping everything to that end and from that viewpoint, Arnold allows her film to run for virtually two hours and fills out the time with subsidiary material. This is particularly the case when we are given a sub-plot about the brother Hunter who wants to run away with the girl whom he has made pregnant but whose parents oppose him. Then there’s the fact that, although there is a further brief unexpected appearance by Bird at the close, he seems to have left the story by then leaving the film’s final section to be built around Bug’s marriage which plays as an anti-climax. There's also another odd feature here in that pop music – not least Blur’s ‘The Universal’ – is repeatedly used with the intention that the lyrics should comment on the story unfolding (again not a feature one expects when so much of the piece is rooted in realism).
Ultimately, then, one has a film that can be strongly recommended for its acting since Adams provides a wondrously sure-footed centre, Keoghan has rarely seemed so confidently assured and Rogowski finds exactly the right tone for his off-beat role. Nevertheless, one is left with the impression that the film as a whole fails to fuse together as it should if Bird’s unorthodox key role is to make sense. In the 1954 film version of J.B. Priestley’s An Inspector Calls there is an equally bizarre central concept, one that works perfectly, but Arnold never attains that sense of unity which results from everything falling into place and thus enabling us to believe that a novel notion has been fully realised.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Nykiya Adams, Franz Rogowski, Barry Keoghan, Jason Buda, Jasmine Jobson, Frankie Box, James Nelson-Joyce, Sarah Beth Harber, Kirsty J. Curtis, Joanne Matthews, Calum Speed, Rhys Yates.
Dir Andrea Arnold, Pro Lee Groombridge, Tessa Ross and Juliette Howell, Screenplay Andrea Arnold, Ph Robbie Ryan, Pro Des Maxine Carlier, Ed Joe Bini, Music Burial, Costumes Alex Bovaird.
BBC Film/BFI/Pinky Promise/FirstGen Content/Access Entertainment/House Productions/Ad Vitam Productions/Arte France Cinéma-Mubi.
119 mins. UK/France/USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 8 November 2024. Cert. 15.
