Just a couple of months ago, we had an excellent Max Porter adaptation hit screens, the author himself turning his novella Shy into Netflix’s ace Cillian Murphy vehicle Steve. Sadly, lightning has not struck twice with the release of The Thing With Feathers, writer-director Dylan Southern’s take on Porter’s book of (nearly) the same name (which itself has had a Cillian Murphy adaptation, though for the stage) unable to convincingly bring the precisely moving chaos of Porter’s writing to cinematic life. Porter’s novel is one of those that gets labelled ‘unadaptable’, and though I think that’s a nonsense idea overall, The Thing With Feathers is just too self-conscious to make a quality counterargument.
The foundational obstacle here is the eponymous Thing With Feathers, the giant Crow (the size of a man and voiced by David Thewlis) that serves as a physical expression of the overwhelming grief of an unnamed Dad (Benedict Cumberbatch) who is trying to figure out how to survive and raise his sons after the sudden death of his wife. Though Crow remains a well-written character, Southern taking his scattered, ranty-yet-profound dialogue from Porter’s pages, his appearances are always faintly ridiculous, even silly, the inherent literalisation of taking a book to the screen turning a strength into a liability.
Southern occasionally tries to turn Crow into a horror movie monster, but these dreamy sequences aren’t committed enough to be actually scary (the whole thing is pretty stagy), while the Dad’s arguments with Crow feel like any one of a thousand ‘you’re not real’ hallucinations you’ve seen on screen before. Cumberbatch himself makes a decent go of things, always at his best at his quietest, wordlessly shifting his face into the skeletal mask of a man too despairing to sleep, and Thewlis is good casting as Crow’s voice – he can balance pitying and threatening like few others.
The Thing With Feathers is certainly consistently *interesting* and, bar an overstretched ending sequence, keeps itself moving at a brisk pace. The problem is, then, that I never felt the grief that should define this story. Southern’s approach doesn’t let you get wrapped up in the feelings of this Dad and his Boys (also unnamed, and nicely played by real brothers Richard and Henry Boxall), instead pushing the audience into Crow’s position of an outsider intellectualising primal feelings. This, even more than a big crow-man barging around a middle-class London house, is where the literary/cinematic divide is felt most keenly and damagingly; clever but archly uninvolving can work for a story like this on the page, but not on the screen.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 