White Bird in a Blizzard

Gregg Araki (The Living End, The Doom Generation, Mysterious Skin), a pioneer of the new queer cinema of the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, seems an odd choice to adapt Laura Kasischke’s mainstream young adult novel White Bird in a Blizzard (published in 1999). This coming-of-age story is tinged with dark mystery and explores a few taboos, but it’s hardly the type of in your face, nihilistic, challenging subject matter this director usually indulges in. Shailene Woodley (radiant young star of The Descendants, The Spectacular Now, and The Fault in Our Stars) plays Kat Connor, a suburban teenager whose mother disappears when Kat is 17. The film traces Kat’s maturation over several years. Kat’s memories of her mother--seen in flashbacks--and what she subsequently learns about the disappearance, affect her relationships with her father, her best friends, her boyfriend, and the other key figures in her life.

The elaborately manufactured plot strains credibility from the first beat. White Bird in a Blizzard makes this year’s sensationalistic and overwritten Gone Girl look like a neo-realist kitchen-sink drama. Woodley's innate naturalism gets buried under a sea of mannered supporting performances and stilted dialogue. Kat’s constant voice-over narration, laced thickly throughout the first act, keeps the characters at a removed distance. Fortunately, once the film settles into its second act, the VO goes away and we're allowed to observe Kat and understand her through her actions rather than what she explains to us. Along the way we get some strong individual scenes, like one in which Kat seduces the 40-year-old cop (Thomas Jane) who is investigating her mom’s disappearance.  Araki has a knack for shooting sex scenes that feel distinctly realistic while also being erotic and cinematic. It’s no coincidence that the incessant voiceover suddenly vanishes at the same point when Kat and the cop have their seduction scene--this is the first moment in the film that feels authentic and alive.

Yet despite Woodley’s seeming inability to put forth a false note on screen (at least in the films I’ve seen so far) this movie never achieves any more credibility as a character study than it does as a mystery thriller. The central performance comes off as authentic, but the story surrounding it feels completely manufactured. If this film is meant as an exploration of how maternal loss affects a young girl, it fails because Kat’s coming-of-age arc is submerged under the conceits of the stillborn disappearance mystery. Instead of seeing a character develop insight and her self-awareness, we get a character trying on various facades.  Instead of dramatic stakes, we get theatrical scenes of domestic tension and paternal weirdness. Part of the problem is that Eva Green (Casino Royale) plays Kat’s mother as a bizarre hybrid of Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet and Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction. Christopher Meloni (Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) finds an entirely different way to overplay the drabness and repression of Kat’s doormat father. These two actors each give shallow, exaggerated performances that seem like they're acting in their own separate films, rather than coexisting in the same reality as everyone else. The rest of the talented supporting cast--Gabourey Sidibe (Precious), Mark Indelicato (Ugly Betty), Shiloh Fernandez (The East), Dale Dicke (Winter's Bone), Sheryl Lee (Twin Peaks), and Angela Bassett (What's Love Got to Do with It, Malcolm X, How Stella Got Her Groove Back)--all play little more than one-dimensional props who function only as conduits for Kat to express her thoughts.

The picture has the overly detailed feel of an art director trying too hard to create an era with specific costumes, hairstyles, and props; meanwhile the dialogue is full of minor but annoying anachronisms. The only thing that feels authentically ‘80s or ‘90s about White Bird in a Blizzard is the big reveal at the film's climax, which might have been shocking or surprising two decades ago, but today it’s hard to see it as anything but an overused plot twist.