Gregg Araki is a fascinating filmmaker, which means that White Bird In A Blizzard is going to be, if nothing else, a fascinating film. But it feels like there’s something missing. Which, as it happens, is thuddingly appropriate.
It’s a difficult film to parse, really. The things it does right, while well-accomplished, are somewhat alienating. But it succeeds in casting a haze over everything, making the entire movie feel more like a memory or a dream than an actual movie watching experience. This is something Araki does as well as any filmmaker currently working. He makes little differentiation between the present, flashbacks, dreams, and fantasies.
Kat (Shailene Woodley) is a seventeen year old girl on the cusp of womanhood, just livin’ and lovin’ in the late eighties to early nineties. She’s smart, generally well behaved, and very, very horny. One day, her mother Eve disappears (her mother is played by Eva Green, which makes it even more of a tragedy). Kat doesn’t have much of a reaction to the sudden, unexplained vanishing; more than anything, she seems far more interested in getting laid, because as I may have mentioned earlier, she’s like, SUPER horny.
With her studly/dopey boyfriend (Shiloh Fernandez, funny and charming) no longer getting the job done, she turns her attentions on the cop investigating her mothers’ disappearance, Detective Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane), which leads to a seduction scene that’s equal parts queasy and hot… another Araki specialty, come to think of it.
There is, it has to be said, a bit of campiness in all this. Kat has running voiceover musings filled with the kind of labored faux poeticism and clanging metaphors that are part and parcel to the teenage experience. It’s cheesy as all hell, and thankfully more or less drops out of the picture halfway through. But it’s also the exact sort of thing that makes it hard to tell whether or not Araki is winking at me with this stuff.
White Bird In a Blizzard is not a mystery, it’s a coming of age story. It doesn’t really matter all that much where Eve got off to; what really matters is how it affects Kat. Her ambivalence to her mom’s disappearance is clearly rooted in their complicated relationship; Kat seems to be in denial about just how screwed up their relationship was.
There are a lot of interesting threads in there that don’t quite get picked up. Particularly interesting is the idea, barely explored, that Kat used to be overweight, and still carries herself with a lack of confidence because of it. But nothing in the movie itself or Woodley’s performance really speaks to this; it’s stated bluntly in dialogue but not supported in the text of the film itself. Which is disappointing, because that conceit, combined with what we glean from Kat’s voiceovers and several of the scenes between her and Green, indicate some very interesting material that was left on the table.
These ellipses in storytelling contribute to the overall sense of remembrance; we’re never sure how much of this is what really happened, and how much of this is memories. Nobody, really, is a person; everyone is a character in the story of Kat Connor’s life. For instance, her gay high school friend (Mark Indelicato) seems far more out and flamboyant than a small town high school in the late eighties would tolerate, but he never experiences any homophobia or persecution. This seems illogical until you realize that this is Kat’s memory of him, with all his potential messy drama cut out. In her mind, he’s whittled down to nothing more than his role as Kat’s sounding board. After all, what would be the point of his existence outside of that?
The performances do a lot to ground all of this into some form of reality. Woodley, never less than great, has a surprisingly controlled take on her role. She avoids the temptation to telegraph her inner turmoil throughout, reining it all in and letting it slowly leak out over the course of the film until it’s most effective to let go. And even then, she eschews hysterics and plays it real.
Eva Green is…well, Eva Green. It’s a good performance, but due to the nature of the character, she never really gets to play a full-on human. Which is par for the course: her inexplicable nature is kind of the point. They got the right person for the job, obviously, but it’s a doube edged sword: because it’s Eva Green, the crazier she gets, the more familiar it all feels. At this point, I would kill to see her do, like, a stint on New Girl. Or maybe starring alongside Melissa McCarthy in a remake of Twins. Just…something light, y’know?
(Yeah, so the Twins thing started out as a joke, but now I want to see that happen so badly it’s giving me seizures…)
The real revelation here is Christopher Meloni. Of course, Meloni has always been good, but since I’ve watched roughly five thousand episodes of Law and Order: SVU, I think of Meloni first and foremost as an angry dude that yells at rapists. But here he presents a portrait of bland meekness so heartbreaking and pathetic that you both feel very deeply for him and still understand exactly how he’d drive Eva Green out of her mind. It seems like an overly cute conceit to turn an actor so fabled for his intensity into such a meek character, but against all odds, it really works.
But that sort of jokey casting brings me back to the question of how seriously I’m supposed to take all this. The actors all play it straight, but the dream sequence stuff and some of the filmmaking seem to be aiming for straight up camp, like Douglas Sirk on ‘Molly’. And the dissonance between the two modes is…disorienting.
It’s based on a novel by Laura Kasischke, a writer and poet. Having only read the first page, I think it’s safe to assume that a lot of the cheesiness comes directly from the text. I mean, it reads fine, but there is a world of difference between things that read well and things that don’t sound horrifically dumb when said out loud, even if they’re said by an actress as talented as Shailene Woodley.
Truthfully, I kind of get the feeling that more than anything, Araki chose this book and this story because its setting in the 80s allowed him to plausibly curate the sort of soundtrack that seems downloaded directly from the brain of a sentient Hot Topic.
Echo And The Bunnymen? Check. Siouxsie and the Banshees? Check. This Mortal Coil? Check. Jesus and Mary Chain? Check. New Order? I mean, obviously, that’s a check!
The Cure? The Cure?!? Get the fuck outta here!
(Bonus points for incorporating a Soft Cell song that isn’t “Tainted Love”; points deducted for using “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”; that one belongs to Real Genius. And, to a lesser extent, fuckin’ Dennis Miller…)
So Araki sets the mood musically (if you want to create a dreamlike atmosphere, it’s hard to argue with throwing in a little shoegaze), and he sets the scene aesthetically. And he wrangles up some impressive performances. But like I said at the beginning of this, thousands upon thousands of words ago: there’s something missing. It’s a coming of age story that doesn’t actually feature any character growth.
Kat experiences a trauma, and slowly comes to learn and accept the true nature of that trauma, but then the movie basically ends. We don’t get to see how these revelations affect her, or get an idea of who she’s going to be because of (or in spite of) them. And without that sense of character closure, the experience feels incomplete.
So no, the movie doesn’t fully work, but in a way it’s more interesting for it. That’s the advantage of Araki’s aesthetic: his movies feel like dreams, which makes them easy to revisit. And knowing how things play out (and I’m kicking myself for not having figured out where this was all going before the movie actually got there), I’m actually curious to rewatch it and see the little moments I may have overlooked and the possible subtextual grace notes that may have gone unnoticed the first time around.
And yes, it has a pretty good soundtrack. Unless you’re a sixteen year old Goth, in which case it’s the greatest soundtrack ever.
So there’s that…
White Bird in a Blizzard is available On Demand September 25, and will open in theaters October 24.