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Nov 04, 2024

'Bird' Review: Andrea Arnold's Coming-of-Age Tale Flies Blind

Arnold’s artful indulgences often detract from the film’s purported authenticity. Eight years on from American Honey, which saw her fascination with the lives of the young and dispossessed take her

Arnold’s artful indulgences often detract from the film’s purported authenticity.

Eight years on from American Honey, which saw her fascination with the lives of the young and dispossessed take her across the pond for a sprawling picaresque, Bird finds Andrea Arnold back among the British council estates familiar from her earlier work, including Red Road and the Oscar-winning short Wasp. Though more rooted in place than American Honey, Arnold’s latest narrative feature nevertheless demonstrates a little more storytelling ambition than her other homegrown films, something that doesn’t always work in its favor.

This loose coming-of-age tale centers on Bailey (Nykiya Adams), who lives in a squat—in Gravesend, Kent, an estuary town east of London—with her erratic, small-time criminal father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), and self-styled vigilante brother, Hunter (Jason Buda), as well as numerous other apparently transient occupants. Her relationship with Bug becomes strained when he announces his engagement to Debs (Joanne Matthews), his girlfriend of three months, not long before she’s also forced to help Hunter out with his relationship troubles. And through it all, she searches for an identity as she copes with the rumblings of impending adolescence.

With its gritty subject matter and semi-improvised performances, Arnold’s work is often situated in the lineage of British kitchen-sink realism, a comparison that Bird proves to be not entirely accurate. Her approach is more sentimental than observational, as evinced here by the elegiac filter that she applies to the film’s setting with lens flares, nature imagery, and other lyrical flourishes that can flirt with cliché. As evocative as it is, the film’s use of small-town squalor as a blank canvas for artful indulgences often detracts from its purported authenticity.

Joe Bini’s choppy editing and Robbie Ryan’s shaky handheld camerawork are particularly unhelpful in this regard, while also giving the impression that the fragile beauty found in Bird might not hold up to extended scrutiny. Presumably intended to match the energy and desperation of its youthful characters, this aesthetic restlessness could just as easily suggest a nervous outsider rushing through a poor neighborhood, entranced by the raw humanity on display but nonetheless avoiding prolonged eye contact with any of the locals.

Despite this tendency to objectify them and glamorize their deprived living conditions, it would be disingenuous to say that Arnold doesn’t have a level of affection for her subjects, and her non-judgmental humanist outlook is both the source of this film’s appeal and its fundamental weakness. Unlike with 2009’s Fish Tank, which is admirable in its full commitment to exploring the complex network of desires and power relations between its rebellious teen protagonist and Michael Fassbender’s charismatic older man, Bird’s story presents less ambiguity to wrangle with. Its believably flawed characters mostly stop short of any deep moral transgression or damaging interpersonal conflict, leaving the film lacking in urgency or dramatic purpose.

Arnold, though, remains a keen observer of the physicality of her female protagonists, in environments where their freedom and privacy are often limited. Regularly capturing Bailey in fragmentary close-ups and shallow focus, Bird conveys a tenderness toward its protagonist that simultaneously emphasizes her sense of discomfort and isolation. Arnold’s direction of young, non-professional actors is another strength, and Adams, in her debut screen performance, flickers convincingly between affected toughness and shy vulnerability.

But this grounded performance can’t quite carry the overbearing demands of Bird’s plot, with Bailey seeming increasingly inert and passive, even as she becomes more directly involved in events. The multiple narrative strands never cohere fully, and they go particularly slack as Bailey spends more time with the eponymous character (Franz Rogowski), a mysterious, soulful loner who she befriends after an encounter in a field, during one of the film’s more peaceful interludes. Bird claims to have grown up on the same estate as her many years ago, and enlists her help in tracking down the father who subsequently abandoned him and his mother.

Initially appearing to offer a metaphorical and potentially literal escape route from Bailey’s tough existence, as well as a focal point for the meandering story, Bird unfortunately remains an enigma. His significance is made even less clear by the film’s late pivot toward a kind of Aronofsky-lite magical realism, which is enjoyable in its ad hoc spontaneity, though the catharsis that it brings about feels somewhat blunted and unearned.

When Bird does resonate on an emotional level, it’s usually through the efforts of Keoghan, whose magnetic as the unstable, heart-on-his-sleeve Bug. But the underdeveloped relationships between the young father and his children prevent these moments from having a more lasting impact. That a key shift in Bailey’s attitude toward him relies on a flashback for emphasis speaks to the limitations of the film’s impatient, overly subjective approach to narrative development.

Caught between a distanced, aestheticizing gaze and the limited perspective of a troubled 12-year-old girl, Arnold ultimately can’t decide what kind of story she wants to tell. And while the lack of focus partly reflects the precarious lives of the subjects, this is mostly a coincidence.

David Robb is originally from the north of England. A fiction writer, he recently moved back to London after living in Montreal for three years.

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