J Paul Johnson
Swooping, sometimes wildly, between the neo-real and the sublime, the mundane and magical, the sweet and the scarifying, Andrea Arnold’s coming-of-age tale Bird is a familiar tale with a wild twist. Whether that works or not is likely to divide viewers, but there’s no doubting Arnold’s daring, nor is there any question that a pair of fine performances anchor her film in the real while letting it later take flight in the clouds.
I’m reminded of the brilliant Birdy, back from a few generations ago, the William Wharton novel adapted to screen by Alan Parker, and, in some scenes, On the Waterfront, if you focus a bit more on the intergenerational friendship between Brando’s boxer Terry Malloy and little Joey. Like those films, Bird is the story of loners who connect in part for a love of birds. Arnold’s protagonist is twelve-year-old Bailey (an impressive Nykiya Adams in her film debut), a smart young kid who loves nothing better than shooting expressionistic footage with her phone—much of it quite good, and more than a little of it of birds in flight.
Bailey is a little too young to see in herself the promise of artistic talent, and even if she did, it’s hard to imagine her making much of it. Home life, such as it is, is a challenge. Her single dad, a lovesick loser named Bug (played by a tatted-up-and-down Barry Keoghan), clearly loves her but is too much a mess to raise her. Bug’s too busy planning his next marriage and his new get-rich-quick scheme (I am not making this up): distributing a powerful hallucinogenic harvested from the slime of a toad, one that needs to be amped up on dancefloor vibes for properly powerful secretions. That’s what it takes to shoehorn “Murder on the Dancefloor” from Saltburn into this plot that would seem to have nothing to do with it.
Bird, though, is not about Bug. It’s about Bailey. She’s not only ambivalent about the upcoming wedding and the prospect of a new stepmother, her own mother is in the thrall of a violent thug. Meanwhile, her older brother is getting caught up in girls, gangs, and drugs—which, up to this point, Bailey keenly observes, but usually from a safe distance. It’s in the midst of this turmoil she meets a a loner, a quirky free spirit and lost soul named … Bird. On the outskirts of Kent, where the story takes place, Bird (played by German actor Franz Rogowski) lives alone, apparently homeless, pining for a home and family he once had but not having a clue how he might go about recovering it. With his receding hairline, faerie-like demeanor (given to the odd sprightly jig), and elaborately woven sweaters and kilt, it’s hard to know what to make of the man. But Bailey senses a kindred spirit of sorts and dedicates her time and effort to helping him.
There are, in what follows, moments of true friendship and human connection. There are also, as Bailey’s life would have it, dire predicaments, most of them the consequence of toxic masculinity, misogynistic rage, and socioeconomic despair. Arnold, whose previous films Fish Tank and American Honey similarly located teen girls in challenging situations, does not rush the story, allowing the narrative to unfold in fits and starts, with long transitional scenes often using Bailey’s phone footage to amplify the film’s themes of freedom and flight. Even at its slow-ish pace, though, the film does not lag, in part because of its meticulous mise-en-scene, from the graffiti-scrabbled tenement walls of Bailey’s home to the nearby fields where she meets Bird, and its effervescent cinematography.
Keoghan’s ascension to film stardom makes his Bug practically a threat to consume the film when he is onscreen, so magnetic is Keoghan as an actor and so outrageous is Bug as a character. But thankfully, Arnold limits Keoghan’s screen time and allows Bug the kind of character arc that gives his eccentricities some purpose. Keoghan is pretty great in the role, but his is not the role that matters. Nor, it should be said, is Rogowski’s as Bird. The film Bird rests on the performance of young Adams, who seems, physically and emotionally, to mature, if ever so slightly and slowly, before our eyes on screen. Hers—with the distractions of the much more effusive, elaborate performances from Keoghan and Rogowski as Bug and Bird as contrasts—is the character and performance that ultimately matters and that in the end, gives the film its emotional weight.
Bird won’t please every viewer. Some will find its flight too fanciful, while others may wish for more sentiment. With ostentatious characters like Bug and Bird at its periphery, the film threatens at times to collapse under the weight of its own weirdness. But Arnold’s film finds its own way, like its young protagonist, of navigating the weird and the weighty, making for a coming-of-age tale that never feels cliched and that gives its young protagonist plenty of room to make her life make at least a little sense among its chaos.
