WHITE BIRD IN A BLIZZARD
DIRECTOR: Gregg Araki
CAST: Shailene Woodley, Eva Green, Christopher Meloni, Thomas Jane, Shiloh Fernandez, Gabourey Sidibe
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LNS
RUNNING TIME: 91 minutes
RATING: **
This drama thriller smooshes together teen sexual awakening and suburban crime thriller with uneven results. While the actors try hard, they never quite engage the audience, keeping us at arm’s length – events are delivered and suburban boredom is overpowering.
Shailene Woodley delivers a predictably strong performance as the main driver of the narrative, but Eva Green is underused as her mother, as are Christopher Meloni as her father and Gabourey Sidibe as one of her best friends. Basically, the story is centred on how Kat Conners (Woodley) deals with the disappearance of her troubled mother Eve (Green) in the late ’80s. She spends a great part of the film talking about her mother to a psychiatrist, which is how we get to know Eve’s difficulty in settling into boring suburban, stay-at-home-mom territory. Jaded, yet strangely fragile for it, Eve seems to resent Kat’s freedom of movement, emotion and choice. Kat uses her dad’s distractedness about her mom’s disappearance to make nice with the policeman investigating the case – moving on from canoodling with the boy next door to something a bit more adventurous by her standards. The crime thriller aspect is thrown in quite late at which point we race through the clues straight into a plot dump twist.
Adapted from a novel by Laura Kasischke, more attention in the film is given to the coming-of-age teenage sexual drive part of the story than the mystery surrounding Eve’s disappeance. Partly, this is put down to Kat’s naive outlook on what could have happened, but mostly it is us in the 21st century seeing it coming from a mile off. We see things from Kat’s perspective and gain her insight because her character narrates the story through a voice over – we only see the nice parts though, never any resentment of how everything suddenly became about her mom.
Nor are we privy to any curiousity on her part about what happened until a friend mentions said curiousity in passing.There is a lot of talk about feelings, but the actual display is in short supply. The titular dream sequences Kat describes in therapy are heavyhanded, telegraphing the ending. By the end of the film when the mystery is solved in one scene, all you can say is, “so”?
If you liked The Lovely Bones you will like this.