One's experience with Gregg Araki's White Bird in Blizzard (adapted from the novel of the same name by Laura Kasischke) is dependent on how tolerant of stupid teenage behavior one is. The film is a document of a tumultuous time, and makes no real excuses for how awful the main character can be. Though thorny, this is the film at its best. It approaches the perils of adolescence with a frankness rarely seen in depictions of modern teenage life.
The actual nuts and bolts of the plot involve Kat (Shailene Woodley), a teenage girl who has just recently lost her virginity to her dense, boy-next-door boyfriend Phil (Shiloh Fernandez). At around the same time, her mother Eve (Eva Green) disappears. Kat, who always had a difficult relationship with her parents, tries to just let life go on without her mother. But slowly, strange details come to light, and she is forced to confront darker possibilities.
Those darker possibilities are kept as a third act twist. The problem here is that the audience will likely figure the thing out well before then. It’s just that the main character is too self-absorbed to realize the things happening around her. It’s a somewhat intriguing conceit, but it mostly makes the experience fairly frustrating. We are waiting for the movie to reveal things that we already know. If the film had foregone its twist structure, it might have been able to lay out a more balanced plot, and it could have played off the tension of what’s already been revealed and what the main character refuses to see.
But there is still something vital to how this story plays out. Director Gregg Araki mostly restrains himself in this instance, but his ability to delve deep into the morass of teenage emotion is still at play. The director is more willing than most to show his main characters being venal and petty, fully embracing the harsher sides of the teenage experience. The film finds something remarkable in the meanness of its characters, in the blunt honesty with which it presents the idle moments of awfulness that inevitably lead to worse behavior. The film presents a world where awfulness seems to be necessary, managing to find some empathy for these characters.
Araki finds a good collaborator in Shailene Woodley. The actress deftly constructs layers of self-delusion in the main character, finding layer after layer of denial and neurosis as the story goes on. As much as the film goes into soapish territories, Woodley always manages to make Kat feel like a real person, her performance never shying away from the thornier bits of material. She provides a solid center to a cast that at times does seem to be going off in different directions. Eva Green and Christopher Meloni seem to be in completely different movies, occasionally raising the tone to operatic levels.
White Bird in a Blizzard really falters in the end as it becomes more about the film’s central mystery than about how it affects its characters. The thing is, the mystery just isn’t very compelling. The film really finds more of its value in its exploration of the teenage mind, in diving into the pressure cooker of hormones, expectations and fears that turns adolescence into its own crazy mystery. But in the end, the film seems to want to be about revelations that don’t really matter. It’s still not bad, but White Bird in a Blizzard just misses out on the things that make it exceptional.
My Rating:
