Jay Rohr
The Thing with Feathers aspires to do origami with the grave. This adaptation of a novel inspired by a book of poetry wants to provide insightful sadness. The aim is a common enough one, especially for movies dealing with death. Its blend of distorted reality alongside decent acting mixed with cinematic savvy makes for memorable moments. Whether they add up to an entertaining whole is another matter entirely.
Benedict Cumberbatch (The Roses) plays a recently widowed father of two young boys (Henry Boxall and Richard Boxall). Struggling to deal with the unexpected loss of his wife, he begins having surreal encounters with a massive crow-like entity. Though the being tortures him, physically and mentally, the purpose comes across as tough love harshly pecking him towards moving on. The question, though, is if this healing process will push the widower towards salvation or into a deeper hole.
The Thing with Feathers never shies away from depicting grief as a quagmire. The sucking bog pulling down Cumberbatch’s character is relentless. Matters aren’t helped by the two boys who become increasingly difficult brats the more their father disappears into depression. The result is a unique depiction of grief that makes it a multifaceted ugliness growing in toxicity over time.
In addition, the movie doesn’t mind suggesting men have options outside stoicism. Cumberbatch is repeatedly shown sharing feelings, exploring professional help, and all around asked to display his freshest mental injuries. This results in a variety of emotional displays, some depicted with cinematic style such as when he learns to rage rather than wallow in a scene set to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’s “Feast of the Mau Mau”. Simultaneously, it can come across as indulgent since the movie starts to feel like seeing Benedict Cumberbatch be every kind of sad for 104 minutes.
The Thing with Feathers is a dark narrative bordering on gothic horror. Adapted from the novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers by Max Porter, the film does little if anything to set up certain particulars from the source material. This allows for a pronounced impression of the widower descending into madness rather than entering a realm of magical realism. That’s to say, there is an element of doubt injected into the encounters with Crow.
The result is a series of jagged scenes. Each stands out, presenting the unpredictable intrusiveness of grief as well as the chaos it can cause. However, the poetry behind those portions doesn’t always endure. That’s because the movie sacrifices pacing and aspects of the source material to tell its tale. For instance, it isn’t as well established by the film as in the book that the widower’s surreal encounters begin due to his work involving a literary work by poet Ted Hughes entitled Crow: From the Life and Songs of Crow. What’s lost then is the sense of how art is a chain linking the past and present, one that can pull people out of the depths they’re drowning in, since things like grief are universal across all time.
Cinematically, director Dylan Southern, who also penned the script, knows how to establish the right feeling visually with a combination of moody lighting alongside somber stylization. There is always a great sense of watching events unfold like a bird perched nearby. The camera peeps around corners and hovers over people. This conjures proper impressions of sadness, melancholy airs, frightening despair, and all-around misery. But a certain through thread is missing.
There’s never much of a sense that this family was any different. The closest hint is a flashback showcasing how much the widower always lacked parental aplomb. His fumbles with the boys then translate to why he’s struggling without his partner, whom he certainly relied on heavily, but the result is the idea of a man now forced to be the father he never was. It seems to be a revelation shared by the character who then uses it as an excuse to sink further into depression.
That might make the movie unique, yet it also bogs down the emotional aspect. The Thing with Feathers becomes a profile in despair before shifting sharply to offer a typical tale of recovery rushing towards a rosy conclusion. While it’s refreshing to see sadness portrayed as something that can linger, dulling over time before improvement, there’s a moroseness to it some audiences may not appreciate, despite whatever honesty prevails.
Grief is a complicated matter. The impression produced here is not always comfortable. The two boys are sometimes unlikeable which is kind of refreshing. They aren’t making things easier for their father, and while it’s forgivable given their age it’s no less tooth grinding. Alongside that is an effort to convey how hard it is to think about lost loved ones. The mother is largely erased from the story insofar as her face is never shown, the only idea of her comes from how others talk about the deceased.
It’s such instances of subtle storytelling that make The Thing with Feathers shine. However, because it rarely establishes a baseline other efforts don’t exactly hit the same. Consider, Cumberbatch’s character is depicted as occasionally acting like a crow, giving that sense of Gothic madness, but he’s also shown to be an artist. There’s never any notion this is unusual especially since such displays often revolve around him drawing. Ominous music and lighting make it seem odd, yet there’s a chance this is just his process. Essentially, there’s no sense events are entirely out of the norm. All that’s missing is a beleaguered mother picking up after her three children.
The film ends with a poem by R.S. Thomas, a Welsh poet who tried to reintroduce a spiritual element he found lacking in the post-industrial world. Perhaps that best sums up the intent of a film like The Thing with Feathers. The surreal representations experienced by its main characters are personal visions inspired by grief and despair. Still, it seems like it would have made a better music video than a whole movie.
