White Bird in a Blizzard (2014)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on October 16, 2014 @ tonymacklin.net.

Gregg Araki has lost his sting.

It's a sad loss.

Director Araki's latest film White Bird in a Blizzard is a floundering satire. It's American Beauty (1999) revisited in a flaky, snowy glaze.

It has a bevy of one-dimensional characters led by a teenager named Kat (Shailene Woodley), who is coping with her newfound sexuality and the strange disappearance of her mother (Eva Green).

In the movie the mother is an import from the 1950s. She's now in 1988, but has suburban flu from the 1950s. She's trapped in a loveless marriage (sigh), married to a weak husband (double sigh), for whom she has total contempt (triple sigh).

The mother tries to flaunt her repressed sexuality, drinks, insults her daughter, and snaps at her husband. Then suddenly she vanishes.

The supporting characters are a generic motley crew. The boy next door (Shiloh Fernandez) becomes Kat's lover. His mother (Dale Dickey) is blind. Ah, symbolism. The girl's best friends are an overweight African-American (Gabourey Sidibe) and a gay Hispanic lad (Mark Indelicato). The latter two would sink a bad tv show in about a week.

And Kat has a sexual relationship with an older police detective (Thomas Jane, tv's Hung). She gets guidance from a therapist (Angela Bassett), who in the novel was a male father figure. Araki throws his characters around like weighted dice.

But the big question remains. What happened to the mother? Araki changes the book's resolution. He comes up with a clever surprise ending.

Why isn't the film better?

Araki's White Bird in a Blizzard is larded with false clues. The wife has an image of losing her hands in the sink. Araki loses the plot in the kitchen sink.

His screenplay - based on the book by Laura Kasischke - is mediocre. It has a good line when Kat quotes her mother, "You scratch the surface, and there's just more surface."

Unfortunately, White Bird in a Blizzard is just more surface. Araki leads us down the garden path without a garden.

The dialogue often is stilted. Although symbolic, who says lines such as, "You're the cat's meow"? Having everybody say "fuck" a lot is lazy writing.

When director Araki poses his actors with a distance separating them, it is effective, and the music has energy, e.g., a nightclub with flashing lights followed by a montage of sexual antics accompanied by the music of Depeche Mode.

But the edginess and powerful audacity that Araki once exhibited are as missing as the mother is.

In 2004 Gregg Araki directed a remarkable film, Mysterious Skin. It was one of the best films of the year. I put it at the top of my list.

At the time, I predicted that someday Joseph Gordon-Levitt - would win an Oscar. But since that time Gordon-Levitt has never had as challenging a role as he did in Araki's film. He hasn't been close.

Maybe someday Christopher Nolan - with whom he's worked before - will find a role that will inspire Gordon-Levitt to the heights he achieved that one time.

There is no memorable performance in White Bird in a Blizzard. Shailene Woodley, as Kat, barely survives - with bareness - a shaky role. Eva Green struggles as the wacky but vapid mother. Christopher Meloni has one or two expressions as the feckless father.

The supporting cast are cardboard figures. None are unforgettably human like Billy Drago, in Mysterious Skin.

The unique, mysterious authenticity and harrowing credibility that Araki once exhibited in Mysterious Skin has been replaced by glib satire in White Bird in a Blizzard.

You can't go home again. Maybe you can't go back to a movie again.

What a shame.

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