SYNOPSIS: While recounting her life as a fugitive in Nazi-occupied France, hiding in the barn of a classmate, a grandmother (Helen Mirren) gives her troubled grandson a lesson in the importance of kindness and compassion.
CAST: R. J. Palacio, Ariella Glaser, Orlando Schwerdt, Bryce Gheisar, Gillian Anderson, Helen Mirren. Directed by Marc Forster.
REVIEW: “White Bird” wears its heart on its sleeve. An elegant retelling of Grandmère Sara’s story, which originated as a 2019 graphic novel of the same name by R. J. Palacio, it is an earnest testament to the power of imagination and kindness to overcome wickedness.
It’s a Holocaust story told from the point of view of two young people, Sara Blum (as played by Ariella Glaser) who is separated from her parents when the Nazi take over their town, and Julien Beaumier (Orlando Schwerdt) a compassionate youngster with polio who rescues her and hides her away in his parent’s barn. Their bravery in the face of events they can barely understand, let alone control, is moving as this pair of innocents are forced to grow up very quickly.
It’s in the other stuff that the film reveals its origins in young adult literature.
There are several scenes of brutality and violence as the Nazis invade the village and abduct young Jewish students, but director Marc Forster hasn’t made a war film. Instead, he’s made a plea to choose kindness over hatred set against the backdrop of World War II.
The result is a retrained, gently paced character driven tale in need of more urgency.
Forster does a good job of displaying how small gestures can remind us of our humanity in troubled times, but he allows thew cinematic aspects of the storytelling—for example, Sara and Julien’s imaginary travels as an antidote to the world around them—to slow the movie to a crawl.
Much of it looks lovely, and, as an act of kindness, those scenes are on theme, but the flights of fancy plod along, taking away from the more dramatic elements the story has to offer. Danger should hang over every second of Sara’s life, and yet, aside from a scene or two, here is no real sense of peril.
“White Bird” contains potent and timely “Vive l’humanité” messages about compassion—although they are expressed by French villagers, who, by and large, sound like posh BBC broadcasters—and is occasionally touching but doesn’t hit hard enough.
“The Sunlit Night,” a new Jenny Slate comedy now on VOD, feels like a throwback to the oddball indie films of recent decades. No detail is too twee, no setting too obscure. The viewer is reminded of a flood of titles like “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Amelie” come to mind, movies where the quirk factor is set to the max.
Jenny Slate plays Frances, a young woman following in the footsteps of her parents. All three are frustrated artists. “Maybe I’m not an artist,” she says. “Maybe I’m just the daughter of two other artists.” After one spectacularly bad day that sees her break up with her rich boyfriend, get critically savaged by her art professors, find out her lawyer sister is engaged and her parents (David Paymer and Jessica Hecht) are splitting up. As if that wasn’t enough, she gets denied an apprenticeship in Tokyo. Rather than live with her father in his tiny studio she accepts another, less than desirable offer—“He fired his last assistant and now he needs someone to paint a barn, using only the colour yellow.”—with reclusive artist Nils (Fridtjov Såheim) in the far, far north of Norway. “This is where you go when you are exiled,” she says.
Her new life in Lofoten takes some getting used to. She is a fish out of water, the sun never sets, small goats invade her trailer, and the job is a slog, essentially a large paint by numbers project that leaves her little or no time to work on her own paintings. Still, she finds time to explore the nearby Viking Museum run by ex-pat American (Zach Galifianakis) and, despite telling her mother that she is “closed for business, a potential love interest in Yasha (Alex Sharp), a Brooklyn baker who has travelled to the top of the world to give his late father, and not just the ashes, but the whole corpse, a traditional Viking funeral.
“The Sunlit Night” has something offer after a radical rethink following brutal reviews at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival. It’s still a bit sloppy and a little too whimsically weird for its own sake, but Slate and a fun cameo from Gillian Anderson as Yasha’s mother do much of the heavy lifting. Most of the other characters seem to exist simply to add flavour to Frances’ rather colourless journey to find herself.
No amount of re-editing could get “The Sunlit Night” past the basic premise of outsiders navigating the strange Arctic Circle surroundings, but Slate brings charm to a story that otherwise may have been devoid of any realistic or interesting human behaviour.
In Toby Young’s aptly named book How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, now a motion picture starring Shawn of the Dead’s Simon Pegg, he detailed how not to become a success in the cut throat world of New York magazine publishing. In 1995 English journalist Young accepted a job with Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. He may have envisioned himself to be the next Alistair Cooke, but from the second he stepped off the plane from London he was doomed to failure. His laddish stunts and seemingly bottomless aptitude for offending people made him an outsider in the oh-so-proper world of Conde Nast.
For example he broke every office sexual harassment rule by hiring a Strip-o-gram for a fellow employee, and to make matters worse he did it on that most politically correct day of days, Take Your Daughter to Work Day. For most of the time he worked at Vanity Fair he sat idle, collecting a large pay packet for doing very little work. He blew the biggest story he was assigned, interviewing actor Nathan Lane by asking him a series of inappropriate questions, culminating with a discussion about his sexual practises. Lane walked out of the interview, and Young’s career at VF was pretty much over. Perhaps his most pathetic move was to add the prefix “Hon” (short for “Honourable”) to his VISA in an attempt to impress New York women. The Sunday Times called the book “the longest self-depreciating joke since the complete works of Woody Allen.”
For legal reasons, I would imagine, many of the names have been changed—Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter becomes Clayton Harding—and some of the details are different—Vanity Fair is now Sharp Magazine—from the famously sharp tongued memoir, but star Simon Pegg does manage to capture most of the “negative charisma” that Young describes himself as having in the book.
Comparisons to the best selling book end there, however. The basic storyline is the same and many of the incidents from the book are faithfully reproduced, but Young’s analysis of where everything went wrong, the thing that made the book a delight, has not translated. Instead we’re offered up a catalogue of his endless faux pas, many of which are quite funny, without much in the way of social commentary. Compared to the book it’s a rather empty exercise in slapstick and humiliation that plays up the romance between Pegg’s character and Kirsten Dunst at the expense of the book’s in-depth fish out of water story. Like the magazine he was fired from Young’s book is a mix of high-brow ideas presented with low brow appeal. The movie, however, tends to concentrate on the low brow.
The actors are well cast and fun to watch. Danny Huston is suitably oily as Lawrence Maddox, the unctuous editor of the magazine’s On the Town column; Jeff Bridges is effortless as the oddball publisher Harding; Dunst brings a frumpy appeal as the damaged love interest; Gillian Anderson is spot on as a manipulative publicist and Megan Fox ups the sex appeal of the character of starlet Sophie Maes, but this is Pegg’s movie.
As usual he is wonderfully watchable as the oafish Sidney Young (for some reason the author’s name was changed) and brings a great deal of charm to a character who should be unlovable in the extreme.
How to Lose Friends and Alienate People suffers for concentrating on the basic elements of the story—his oafish behaviour and the romance—sacrificing the juicy gossip and insight that made the book a best seller, but is saved by engaging performances from Pegg and Bridges and some funny, but cringe worthy moments that redefine social awkwardness.
There’s an old joke about David Duchovny. In it he goes to a psychic to get his fortune read.
“I have good news and bad news for you” she says, peering into her crystal ball. “Which would you like first?”
“Give me the good news…” he says, breathlessly.
“Well… you will have a long career in movies.”
“Really! That’s great,” he says. “What’s the bad news?”
“Every successful movie you appear in will have the letter “X” in the title.”
And so we have X-Files: I Want to Believe after a ten year big screen Duchovny drought that included films like House of D, Connie and Carla, Trust the Man and many other movies you haven’t heard of.
Set in a bleak and snowy West Virginia the story begins when a female FBI agent is abducted. After a convicted pedophile priest named Father Joe (Billy Connolly) has visions related to the agent’s disappearance the retired and reclusive Fox Mulder (Duchovny) is called in to help with the case. Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) his former FBI partner, now his partner in life, has also left the agency and is working as a doctor. She grudgingly becomes involved in the missing persons case despite endlessly reminding Mulder that she’s “done chasing demons in the dark.” At the same time she becomes emotionally involved with a young patient who can only be saved with a radical, invasive procedure. When the psychic gives her a veiled, opaque message she wavers between trusting her head and her heart.
On The X-Files television show, which ran for 202 one-hour episodes from 1993 to 2002, FBI Agents Mulder and Scully—one a believer the other a skeptic—investigated all manner of strange and supernatural phenomenon. No paranormal plotline was too far out for the brooding duo. They looked into the man-eating Jersey Devil, extraterrestrial serums and mutated killer cockroaches. The show was ominous and dark, but it had imagination, a trait sadly lacking from X-Files: I Want to Believe. Co-writer and director Chris Carter seems to have eliminated the “para” from the show and emphasized the “normal.”
The film is a run-of-the-mill detective story with a psychic angle tacked on. Cardboard characters—former Pimp My Ride host Xzibit as Agent Mosley Drummy is direct from the angry cop section at Central Casting—repetitive dialogue and a non-climax make I Want to Believe a lackluster affair.
Duchovny and Anderson bring little of the sexual tension that propelled their relationship on the TV series. He has a few of the trademark Mulder one-liners—and there is a good gag that suggests George W. might be an alien—but Anderson’s role has been significantly reduced. She’s a doctor who searches for ways to treat her patients on Google and spends much of the movie chanting, “That’s not my life anymore.”
A big screen adaptation of a television show should improve on the small screen efforts, but instead series creator Chris Carter offers up a talky nonstarter that barely measures up to the source material. Even a casual X-Files fan could name any number of episodes far superior than this unnecessary remounting.
SYNOPSIS: While recounting her life as a fugitive in Nazi-occupied France, hiding in the barn of a classmate, a grandmother (Helen Mirren) gives her troubled grandson a lesson in the importance of kindness and compassion.
