The panicked chaos of having to essentially become your own parent while you’re still a child is the beating heart of Bird, Andrea Arnold’s first fiction feature since 2016’s American Honey. Sadly, it’s a chaos that gets the better of this intriguing yet deeply flawed and wonky film about a 12 year old girl in run down Gravesend who makes a possibly magical new friend, an off-kilter mash-up of Arnold’s typical social realism and a new-to-her magical realism, two modes that never coalesce to form any sort of coherent whole.
This 12 year old girl is Bailey (classic Arnold-style newcomer/discovery Nykiya Adams), the middle of three children of Bug (Barry Keoghan), all from different mums and, in the case of Bailey and her older half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda), had whilst Bug was still a kid himself. They live in a sort of squat/commune, a friendly but frazzled place to grow up, and Bug – who carries himself more as a feckless older brother than a father – has lost focus on Bailey, too concerned with his upcoming wedding to Kayleigh (Frankie Box), mother of his third and youngest kid. Desperately seeking some structure and clearly perturbed by the complete lack of boundaries in her world, Bailey rebels, ending up spending the night in a nearby field.
It’s here she meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), a strange man clearly not from around there but looking for his origins – he seems to have been born in Gravesend but has no idea who his parents are/were. Intrigued and looking for any sort of reliable adult ally, Bailey agrees to help Bird, who appears to have some sort of mystical connection to his namesakes, namely crows and seagulls. It’s an odd, impish character and performance that takes some real adjusting to, and the scenes with Bird in them always seem to come from a complete different movie to the stuff where he’s absent.
Adams is an impressive find, though, and Bailey’s navigation of her splintered family (her mum, with new young kids of her own, has a foul new Scouse boyfriend) is Bird’s strongest suit, especially in the genial relationship between Bailey and Hunter, who has recently joined a vigilante gang to bring some ‘justice’ back to Gravesend. Their sibling dynamic is earnest and lived-in, grounded and affecting where most of Bird is too floaty to really make an impact, even with Arnold’s typically immersive hand-held cinematography.
A lot of British social realism is pretty drab and homogenous and, to its credit, that is not something you can accuse Bird of, even if it does itself get kind of repetitive as it goes on. Yet, in swinging too far in the other direction, it unbalances itself, tumbling over time and again, lurching between tones in a way that eventually just left me cold and exhausted, with some particularly wild swings in the third act that border on laughable. It’s still heartening to have Arnold back in cinemas though, let’s just hope the next one is steadier and takes less than eight years to reach us.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 