Bird

 

Director Andrea Arnold

Arnold with Jason Buda and Nykiya Adams

Arnold with her lead cast at Cannes

Cinematographer Robbie Ryan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BIRD                          B+                                                                                                        Great Britain  USA  France  Germany  (119 mi)  2024  d: Andrea Arnold

This is the next century
Where the universal’s free
You can find it anywhere
Yes, the future has been sold

Every night we’re gone
And to karaoke songs
How we like to sing along
Though the words are wrong

It really, really, really could happen
Yes, it really, really, really could happen
When the days they seem to fall through you
Well, just let them go

No one here is alone
Satellites in every home
Yes, the universal’s here
Here for everyone

Every paper that you read
Says tomorrow is your lucky day
Well, here’s your lucky day

It really, really, really could happen
Yes, it really, really, really could happen
If the days they seem to fall through you
Well, just let them go

—The Universal by English alternative rock band Blur, 1995, inspired by Alex and his Droogs from Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), Blur - The Universal (Official Video), Full HD (Digitally ... YouTube (3:55)

From the director of social realist films like RED ROAD (2006), FISH TANK (2009), and American Honey (2016), each of which won the Cannes Jury Prize (3rd Place), winning an Academy Award with her short film WASP (2003), converting to an overly abstract, experimental style in both Wuthering Heights (Arnold) (2011) and Cow (2021), this is a return to form for Arnold, an adrenaline-laced, kitchen sink exposé of a British underclass in the north Kent region (the same area where Arnold grew up) that feels like FISH TANK on steroids, where this is an aggressive, in-your-face assault to the senses, almost as if time and the film speed itself was sped up.  The raucous music adds an underlying layer of unbridled punk ferociousness, while the abstract, psychologically fractured style is unique, minimizing narrative form, instead creating a hallucinogenic atmosphere of drug-induced ferocity balanced against the internal world of a coming-of-age 12-year old Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams), who is vulnerable yet resilient, mature beyond her years, navigating her way through a suffocating atmosphere and a seemingly endless series of labyrinthean challenges, an extension of the young female protagonists in both FISH TANK and AMERICAN HONEY, where the creative sound design is phenomenal, making this one of the best edited films of the year, where you never really know where this is going.  As is Arnold’s style, rarely working with established actors, she allows an unknown lead character to literally carry the film, and Adams is electrifying, onscreen for nearly the entire film, yet this film defies expectations, adding surreal elements that simply alter the landscape, creating tonal shifts that are as wildly expressive as the furious post-punk of the Irish rock band Fontaines DC, where a punctuating opening song Too Real asks “Is it too real for ya?,” BIRD | Official Clip | In Theaters Now YouTube (1:36), a theme that permeates through every frame of the film, challenging viewers at every turn, upending any idea of what we’ve seen before, creating something entirely new, a brash expression of the new world order.  Bailey, who is black, straddles two families, one that is white, living with Barry Keoghan playing Bug, a mostly shirtless, perpetually loud and chaotic father to Bailey, literally adorned with insect tattoos, and her equally troubled older half-brother Hunter (Jason Buda), a family marked by dysfunction and hopelessness, and one that is black, as her mother, Peyton (Jasmine Jobson), lives in a decrepit drug house with three younger siblings on the other side of town, where the brazen abuse of her terrifying boyfriend Skate (James Nelson-Joyce, the nastiest piece of work in any Arnold film) and the paralyzing fear he generates, especially towards the children, adds a brutal dimension of extreme psychological harm in a tumultuously exploding world.  Bug, who doesn’t look much older than his kids (a father at 14), is a troublemaking knucklehead and drug dealer who doesn’t really concern himself with parenting in any real sense, as his virtually unemployable, irresponsible life is so out of control in their graffiti-strewn neighborhood that his constant diversions and distractions allow them to pretty much run their own lives, where in this world unsupervised children are the norm.  Featuring an extraordinary selection of music, Bird by Andrea Arnold (Soundtrack), so integral to the enveloping atmosphere, where Bug seems to have a particular affection for singing along with Blur - The Universal (Later... with Jools Holland 1995) - Full ... YouTube (4:01), a dystopian song that oozes a fake optimism, synonymous with an elated sense of Britpop promise in the 90’s that was subsequently crushed under a wave of conservatism, yet when he makes a surprise announcement that he’s going to get married, introducing Kayleigh (Frankie Box), who is a complete stranger, and Kayleigh’s baby daughter into their lives, Bailey is thoroughly disgusted by the idea, as their lives are already complicated enough.  “There’s no place like home” this isn’t.    

In an article for The Guardian in 2021, We are animals. We need to connect to the millions of non- ..., Arnold wrote:

Whenever I have felt troubled or lost or overwhelmed with life I have always sought nature.  It has always grounded me and put me in touch with myself again.  No one taught me this.  It came quite naturally.  Like some innate knowledge.  Partly I think because I had a very free childhood.  My mum had me very young, at 16, and three siblings followed by the time she was 22.  My dad was only a few years older.  I never saw him that much in my early years and he was gone completely by the time I was 10.

So, unsupervised most of the time, I lived a fantastically wild life.  I grew up in north Kent on an estate surrounded by liminal wilderness.  From early, I would spend entire days roaming wherever the fancy took me.  Between estates and chalk pits and deserted old industrial spaces and woods and motorways.  Out of this grew a deep love of insects and birds and animals and plants.  Stray estate dogs, the Traveller ponies chained by the motorway, the fish and frogs in the water-filled bomb site, wild strawberries on the banks of the chalk pits.  I can conjure up these places vividly now.  The smells and sounds and feels and colours.             

At Cannes the film won the Carrosse d’Or, or Golden Coach Award, bestowed by the Society of French Directors showcasing “innovative qualities, courage and independent-mindedness,” joining a distinguished group of past winners including Martin Scorsese, Werner Herzog, Jia Zhangke, Jane Campion, Jim Jarmusch, Kelly Reichardt, and Clint Eastwood, with Arnold tearfully indicating it was the toughest shoot of her career, and the most painful, with many more challenges than usual, making it particularly difficult to find the film she envisioned from the footage she shot, which may explain the kaleidoscopic editing structure that continually keeps viewers on edge.  Yet this also may be the most cinematic film she’s ever made, as Arnold fearlessly refuses to be pigeonholed as a social realist, capturing the extremes of the fantastical with the unending challenges of living in a world that is literally crumbling under your feet.  What’s different about this working class exposé is that nobody is actually working, or even going to school, leaving them precariously vulnerable to the violence that is seemingly everywhere, with no love in sight, where an escape from reality is a necessity, opening up a crack of light in an area otherwise consumed by rampant poverty and social decay.  Bailey is a sensitive and rebellious girl who lives in Gravesend, a Kent neighborhood mentioned in several Charles Dickens novels characterized by apartment blocks covered in graffiti and dysfunctional families, who doesn’t even have a bed, just a sleeping bag that she curls up in, spending much of her time alone, or sometimes with a group of young thugs in the area who view themselves as the “protectors,” targeting domestic abuse offenders with their own extremely violent, vigilante justice style brand of retribution.  But her life changes when she meets Bird (Franz Rogowski), a mysterious wanderer who appears out of nowhere doing a twirl for her camera dressed in a kilt in search of his birth parents he has never known, and while she’s initially wary, keeping her distance, she ultimately decides to help him in his search, as he seems to have a special connection with children, eventually making a deeply profound personal connection, where he takes on the role of her guardian angel.  Her innocence stands in stark contrast to the shadowy underworld dealings of her manic father, who spends a good amount of time attempting to persuade a Colorado River toad to secrete a slimy hallucinogenic substance, something he thinks will make him a fortune, or at least pay for his wedding, but this only seems to happen when he plays “sincere,” old-style “Dad music” that he hates, hilariously turning to Coldplay’s rendition of Coldplay - Yellow (Official Video) YouTube (4:32), which seems to work like a charm.  Bailey has a habit of filming what she sees on her phone, including the flight of birds, butterflies, horses, or disturbing moments of violence, as well as her initial meeting with Bird, all of which comprise a personal journal, like diary entries that document her evolving life, projecting her videos on the walls of her room at night, though sometimes they just run through her mind, showing us the world through her eyes.  Captured through a dizzyingly frenetic handheld camera, reflective of the emotional inner instability of these lives, so fragile against the eruptive violence that surrounds them, yet there is poetry to be found in the wretched ugliness of life on the poorest margins of society, where there are flashes of mysterious and dreamy moments, like the camera pointing upwards to the sky, or seeing Bird continually standing atop a high-rise building, recalling the reckless impulsiveness and daredevil games of the alienated high school youth in Toshiaki Toyoda’s Blue Spring (Aoi haru) (2001) or the angels perched atop the ledges of skyscrapers high above the city in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire (Der Himmel über Berlin) (1987).   

With references to Vittorio De Sica’s MIRACLE IN MILAN (1951), where protagonists escape the misery of postwar ruins by broomstick, a neo-realist fable that no one complained about, by the way, ranked 3rd on Cahiers du Cinéma’s Top 10 Films of the Year List in 1951, or more overtly Ken Loach’s KES (1969), as both realistically portray, with poetic elements, the daily lives of teenagers who take refuge from their harsh reality through a friendship with birds, this film depicts a turbulent transition from childhood to womanhood, struggling with everyday problems, where nothing is remotely straightforward, continually taking strange detours along the way, becoming, in essence, a metamorphosis in action, where the ideas just keep coming.  Despite her tender age in a time of transition, Bailey has to deal with much greater conflicts and responsibilities, where we are literally lured into her child’s-eye view of the world, showing the brutality of forgotten environments that children are forced to live in, where there is seemingly no place for them, as the entire system has failed them, suggesting they are able to dream of freedom (“It really, really, really could happen”) beyond the squalor that surrounds them.  Shot on 16mm by Arnold regular Robbie Ryan, who also works with Ken Loach and Yorgos Lanthimos, this rich and layered film is most of all an exhilarating experience, easily her most “out there” film, as the audacity of the “what the fuck” factor screams originality, skillfully told with striking empathy and ingenuity, where some have criticized elements of CGI magical realism mixed in, something never seen before in an Andrea Arnold film, but they feel more like surreal moments, as the transformations are completely in character, initially manifested with relative subtlety until the film explodes with the full force of unleashed creativity, where viewers need to keep an open mind on the power of cinematic suggestion.  Having the courage to make outrageous narrative choices leads the film on unexpected paths, like the perilous side journeys Odysseus takes in The Odyssey, while also grasping a child’s state of grace and wonder that recalls Benh Zeitlin’s 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #1 Beasts of the Southern Wild (2012), as otherwise this might be mired in miserablism or poverty porn, yet this feels elevated and empowering, completely grounded in a grim reality, yet it’s so much more rewarding, both bleak and hopeful all at once, literally transcending the material, as there’s a surprise in nearly every shot.  Arnold seems to specialize in stories of neglected and endangered girls on the verge of becoming young women while living in brutal or inhospitable environments, yet this adds another layer, namely Bailey’s fascination with birds, while she also may be queer, or at least leaning in that direction, showing an aversion to girly things, where her self-absorbed father is just too oblivious to notice, or care.  Yet one of the featured aspects of the film is a parallel curiosity about parenting, as Bird is as interested in his journey of discovery about his missing parents as Bailey is with unlocking the buried secrets of hers, leading to a powerfully dynamic and emotionally riveting conclusion, with these revelations beautifully interwoven into the film, where one of the questions this film asks is whether we can ever really be free of the trauma that shaped our lives.  The raw, unforgiving world of Arnold’s movies and the struggles of these young girls to survive are brutally honest observations that are overwhelmingly truthful and sincere, embracing life’s imperfections, accentuating class disparity and familial neglect while offering resilience in the face of adversity, tenderness in the face of chaos, where the poetic excursions are like an epiphany that only add, not detract, from the film’s overall impact, as it simply refuses to end in tragedy, and continues to play out over the end credits.  Difficult, experimental, and ambiguous, yet exquisite.    

Wild Boys of the Road

 

Director William Wellman

WILD BOYS OF THE ROAD          B                                                                                         USA  (68 mi)  1933  d: William Wellman

You read in the papers about giving people help.  The banks get it.  The soldiers get it.  The breweries get it.  And they’re always yelling about giving it to the farmers.  What about us?  We’re kids!               —Tommy (Edwin Phillips)

A companion piece to John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), this film was largely a response to newspaper headlines about America’s transient youth, but also a Russian film about countless gangs of street kids by Nikolai Ekk, THE ROAD TO LIFE (1931), predecessors to even more starkly realistic films like Buñuel’s portrait of the young wretched of the earth living in the slums of Mexico City in LOS OLVIDADOS (1950), or Hector Babenco’s chronicling of Brazil’s burgeoning population of street children in PIXOTE (1981), where three million homeless children were living in São Paulo’s shanty towns.  The film is also something of a follow-up to Wellman’s earlier film BEGGARS OF LIFE (1928), starring Louise Brooks as a train-hopping hobo who dresses like a boy to survive (think Linda Manz fifty years later in 1978 as a runaway in Terrence Malick’s elegiac DAYS OF HEAVEN), with far more effective camerawork in this film by Arthur Todd than the rather studied cinematography in the earlier Wellman film, beautifully capturing the restless spirit of life on the road with dazzling location work on speeding trains.  Even today it’s hard to fathom the staggering repercussions of the Great Depression, as by early 1933 twelve million workers were unemployed, almost 25% of the American workforce.  What’s not commonly known is that millions of children were affected by shortened school years, with approximately 5000 schools closing altogether, causing 40% of high school aged youth to be out of school, up to 60% in rural areas, where three million of those jobless were young, between the ages of 16 and 25.  Seeing no hope for employment, many hopped on freight trains taking them to various parts of the country seeking better job opportunities.  Just as the Great Depression lingered through the 1930’s, so did the large number of individuals riding the rails across America.  In 1927 over 50 percent of transients thrown off the railroads were men in their forties or older, but by 1932, 75 percent of those accused of trespassing were under 25 years of age, boys and girls alike, young hobos who typically owned only the ragged clothes on their backs.  It’s important to remember all this happened prior to the implementation of things like welfare, unemployment insurance, and Social Security, the first signs of federal intervention in local affairs.  That is the backdrop to this film, a cautionary tale warning youth of the dangers of running away and riding freight trains, struggling against the unstable hardships of hobo existence, always met in every train yard with a crowd of policemen with clubs, where even today the U.S. has the highest poverty rate of children in the industrialized world (America's Poor Are Worse Off Than Elsewhere), but the film had an unintended effect, actually serving to romantically entice many to the adventure of travel on the road, the exact opposite of its aim.  The screenplay by Earl Baldwin is an adaptation of David Ahern’s story Desperate Youth, where this pre-Code movie brings a hard edge and unflinching depiction of poverty and the victimization of youth that is rare to find in Hollywood. 

The weakest part of the movie is the melodrama that frames the picture, as the beginning and ending are formulaic, the kind we see in hundreds of other pictures, shot in a Hollywood sound studio, indistinguishable from anything else made at the time.  Eddie (Frankie Darro) and Tommy (Edwin Phillips) are two small-town California high school kids doing what all kids do, showing up at a dance where they mingle and occasionally dance with local girls, but the spirit of their best buddy friendship is stronger than the allure of any girl, or God forbid a love affair.  When Eddie realizes his friend is down on his luck, having no money to his name as his single mom is going through an extended period of hard times, he turns to his dad for help, only to discover he’s just lost his job as well, and even for a teenager, this is powerful stuff, as it hits him like a ton of bricks.  When he and Tommy commiserate about their future, they decide the best way they can help their parents is to hit the road, hoping to find work elsewhere, as that will at least be “one less mouth to feed” for their struggling families.  With this, they hit the railroad yard and hop the first train out of town.  Once the film shifts to location shooting, the entire mood changes, becoming in the 1930’s what the French New Wave inspired in the 60’s, as it was no longer an insipid formulaic movie shoot, overreliant on script and staged drama, but real life as it happens, where the spontaneous energy is suddenly vibrant and innovative, giving the director free reign in what he chooses to shoot, exhibiting more creative control on the sheer look and feel of the picture.  Wellman’s grim location shooting captures the bleakness of that moment in history, as these kids are out of options, having nowhere else to turn, suddenly finding themselves on their own at such a young and tender age.  On the train they run into Sally (Dorothy Coonan at 19, the future Mrs. Wellman, who got her start as an uncredited Busby Berkeley dancer), a runaway girl who dresses like a boy with a cap on her head and talks tough, like the rest of them, a necessary survival instinct, as there are literally hundreds of other kids just like them, surrounded by vultures who prey on the weak, so the kids deliberately kept separate quarters from the adult camps.  As their numbers multiply into a small army of a hundred or more living in out-of-the-way Hooverville roadside encampments, Eddie becomes a de facto leader in defending their hobo jungle against an onslaught of police in scenes that are given a documentary look, revealing there was no shame in standing in breadlines all day when millions of others were just as destitute.  Made about the same time as King Vidor’s Our Daily Bread (1934), Theodore Caplow, who founded the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia, wrote in The American Sociological Review in 1940, “Between ten and twenty thousand illegal train riders are apprehended daily on American railroads.  Between two and three thousand were killed every year between 1920 and 1938, and a somewhat greater number injured,” TRANSIENCY AS A CULTURAL PATTERN.      

With a short running time of just over an hour, the depiction of middle class life suddenly evaporates into thin air, becoming instead a social conscience picture given a newsreel look, which is not afraid to show a sexual assault (by an uncredited Ward Bond, no less), violence, murder, and a rather horrific accident.  The Warner front office had misgivings about an astonishingly gruesome scene in which the leg of Tommie is crushed by an oncoming train, having knocked himself senseless by running into a sign to avoid capture by the “railroad dicks,” Wild Boys of the Road Clip YouTube (36 seconds), but Wellman, the maker of 82 movies in 35 years (seven in 1933 alone), and a product of the studio system, yet also a reflection of his own unique lifetime experiences, insisted on the authentic depiction of everyday dangers and living conditions and cast real hobos for the sewer pipe and city dump Hooverville sequences.  Outside of the leads, the cast is made up entirely of non-professional or largely inexperienced actors, where it’s hard not to be charmed by Frankie Darro’s harrowing performance, as he assumes the role of the charismatic leader of a youthful gang of homeless and penniless vagabonds, and always remains at Tommy’s side even after losing a leg, never losing sight of their friendship.  He began his career as a child actor, appearing in his first film at the age of six, yet due to his diminutive size, he continued to play teenage roles well into his twenties, doing all his own stunt work, and later became a stunt man.  He is perhaps best known for his role as Lampwick, the unlucky boy who turns into a Pleasure Island donkey in Walt Disney’s second animated feature, PINOCCHIO (1940), Pinocchio (1940) - Pleasure Island/Donkey Transformation YouTube (7:22).  Tougher and harder-edged than any other Warner’s movie of the 30’s, giving us an authentic window into the Depression years, especially noteworthy are the nerve-wracking scenes of kids jumping on and off the moving trains, or the police washing away a vagrant community with fire hoses, while it also displays seemingly improvisational dance moments that come out of nowhere with a free-styling Darro, Breakdance first ever YouTube (26 seconds), and Coonan doing a tap dance routine providing their own superlative moments.  In the end, however, Warners made the director change the downbeat ending from the kids being hauled off to jail into something more uplifting, where the NRA plug (National Recovery Administration, unanimously declared unconstitutional 2 years later by the U.S. Supreme Court) is far from subtle, with a sympathetic judge (a deliberate FDR reference, essentially outlining the New Deal policy) instead offering them a chance after Darro’s inspiring courtroom appeal, thinking the audience would find the proposed original ending just too dismal.  What really surprises in this film is that Eddie and the kids come from middle class homes, living normal lives, but the Depression has uprooted their lives and turned it upside down, where now they’re clawing and scratching for every inch of available space, always on the lookout to find work and the hopes for a bite to eat, but there were just no opportunities.  Keeping a head on their shoulders and their dignity intact under those circumstances is admirable, where the old adage is “There, but for the grace of God, go I.”  In December 2013, the film was selected to the National Film Registry, Complete National Film Registry Listing.