Andrea Arnold’s “Bird” is set in northern Kent, among neighborhoods that are pockmarked with graffiti and wear and tear. Most of the adults that we see appear to be arrested children in their late 20s and 30s, who party and blast their music and hook up. Meanwhile, the actual children make it a practice to pretend not to notice the instability of their lives, passing off their loneliness as cynicism.
We’re in the realm of the British kitchen-sink drama, where hard knocks are plentiful.
“Bird” comes on as a kitchen-sinker in all caps. The characters swirl in and out of seemingly bombed-out rooms cursing, while we gradually sort out who’s who. Twelve-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) is living with her father, Bug (Barry Keoghan), who for a while I thought might be her older brother. Bug has an amusing scheme for trying to make money, as he has frogs that he is attempting to harvest for their hallucinogenic properties. He and his mates blast music while they dance around with the frogs, leading to an authentically poignant, beautiful moment: a bunch of tough guys, more vulnerable than they think they are, all singing along with Coldplay’s “Yellow.”
There isn’t much plot here for a while, and that’s “Bird” at its best. The draws are: Adams, a strikingly intense and subtle newcomer; Keoghan in an electric and convincingly flakey star turn; and Arnold herself, a celebrated filmmaker with an eye for potent images and confidence with actors.
Arnold fashions a slipstream of compositions that alternate between what Bailey films on her phone and what the filmmaker and other cast members have managed to capture on the fly. The editing is jagged and alive, the soundtrack is vivid and moving, and the settings are lived-in, feral-feeling. Great touches abound, such as Bailey having a bedroom that is actually a tent fashioned from blankets in a living room that is party central. Such a detail shows the exclusivity here of privacy and safety.
And yet this all feels pre-assembled anyway, and that suspicion intensifies once Arnold begins introducing stock plot elements. There’s an abusive lover, a father who moved on from his son years ago, a wedding, a bit of coming of age, and even an alien savior/martyr figure in Bird (Franz Rogowski), who befriends Bailey and embodies the hope for beauty and escape that animates even these bleak surroundings.
Arnold’s electric staging sells this material for a while, but it becomes as sentimental and calculated as it sounds, especially given the endless animal symbolism. Compared to authentically volatile Arnold films like “Fish Tank,” “Bird” feels like a precious exercise. And yet — it can’t be dismissed.
Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” also tells a story of a mature child in precarious circumstances. As the title suggests, the film is set during the German bombing campaign of London during World War II. It is 1940, and Rita (Saoirse Ronan) sends her biracial son, George (Elliott Heffernan), away on a train with other children to seek safety from the bombings. After defending himself against bullying, George jumps off the train and begins a journey across the countryside. McQueen cuts between Rita’s efforts working in a factory and living with her father, George’s journey, and various flashbacks to fill in the gaps.
Every McQueen film is praised to the skies — “Hunger,” “Shame,” “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows” are his — and with the exception of “12 Years a Slave” and parts of his miniseries “Small Axe,” I don’t get it. McQueen specializes in visually impressive and highly diagrammed films that often seem to be dead from the neck down. When George, mistaking his being sent away by Rita for rejection, tells her that he hates her, the moment, the lynchpin for the entire film, is remarkably unmoving. Yes, certain catharses are on the way, but this moment casts the wrong kind of pall over the film.
McQueen might think the coldness of Rita and George’s farewell exchange is a testament to his integrity, and yet much of “Blitz” is played in a broad register. In scene after scene, you respond to the exquisite set design and sound editing and camera placement while actors say lines. The film is fine, it goes down easy, especially with all that creamy wax museum cinematography, but it doesn’t matter.
For a young actor, Heffernan is an unusually self-contained presence, which is a refreshing contrast from eager-to-please tykes and realistic of a boy who has seen atrocity ahead of his years, and yet all the while he, in part, keeps you at a distance from the movie. McQueen loves these simmering stoic performances, and every once in a while one of them connects, like John Boyega’s in the “Red, White and Blue” segment of “Small Axe.” Often, though, McQueen’s actors feel like figures in a diorama.
Yes, even Ronan, a vivid actress who needs to break out of her Masterpiece Theatre phase. This is the second movie this year with Ronan that’s intended to win awards and improve my life. The other is “The Outrun,” a tortured, chronologically scrambled shambles that I’ve already forgotten. Ronan is 30 years old. She’s too young and talented to be designated one the grande dames of Oscar bait.
Let’s close our last session before Thanksgiving with another story of a magical outsider who shakes up a community, “Hot Frosty,” the number one movie on Netflix this week. Or so Netflix tells us: Who knows? Nothing’s real anymore anyway, as we each live in our own gated, heavily mediated fantasy lands with realities of our own choosing.
I’m not pretentious enough to divine sociopolitical subtext from the endless run of intentionally synthetic Christmas movies that are available on Hallmark and Netflix, among others. Or am I? They do reflect back to us our need to insulate ourselves with the media of our own choosing. They are so closed off from reality that the unreality becomes a critique of itself. Whether that critique is accidental or not doesn’t matter.
These films are relaxing for their pointlessness, but their studied omission of money, sex, other pop culture, small talk — of everything, really, except an infant’s idea of romance and Christmas — suggests a dystopia of rigid sanitization. I’m not too good for Hallmark and Netflix Christmas movies. I have watched them with my partner many times, and her pleasure in this case is my pleasure. My point is that they should be taken more seriously, as they illustrate the thin line between a craving for safety and fascism. They are reassuringly trivial because most of life has been fastidiously stomped out.
Anyway, “Hot Frosty,” which has one of the best titles one of these things could have. It’s exactly what you think it is: a romance between a beautiful lonely-heart and a snowman that’s brought to life into trembling muscled flesh that’s ripe for harmless PG-ish ogling. Lacey Chabert and Dustin Milligan are the couple, and they are as attractive and goody-goody as their contracts mandate. Lauren Holly, Katy Mixon Greer, Craig Robinson, and Joe Lo Truglio offer supporting flavor, especially Lo Truglio, an ace character actor.
There’s nothing else and that’s the point. I respect how the Netflix and Hallmark Christmas movies do exactly what they are supposed to do. They’re professional that way. Just think of Christmas and, let’s repeat, nothing else. Your troubles will be waiting for you when you return, depending on which reality you have on tap.
“Bird” is now playing at Movieland, and will be streaming soon on Mubi. “Blitz” is streaming on Apple +, and “Hot Frosty” is on Netflix.
