A wonderfully high-flying “Bird” (2024)

 

To enter Andrea Arnold’s world is to be subject to some harsh reality. Many of her characters live marginal lives and abide in varying degrees of poverty, literal and spiritual. No, let me amend that; very often, there is a spiritual nexus or tacit search for something like joy, if not redemption, in her characters, which leads to strangely life-affirming and dare I say, hopeful strains in her narratives.

Arnold’s by no means miserablist. She is often mentioned in the same breath as Ken Loach and this is understandable, but she is very much her own filmmaker. She’s also fearless, a word that is batted around without merit in some cases, but she’s fearless in her clear-eyed look at economic disadvantage, social inequities, and lives on the margins. With Bird, her latest film, she traffics in a different kind of fearlessness; it’s possibly her most hopeful film yet, all the while not turning a blind eye to child neglect, poverty, abuse, and the bleak prospects afforded by a life in the estates or what Americans would call projects. 

Bird oozes a remarkable degree of hope. Barry Keoghan’s Bug is over the moon with his fiancee and pins being able to pay for a banger reception on auctioning off a large frog whose secretions are hallucinogenic. When we first encounter Bug, he is obviously not the most responsible guy. He’s fathered several children, including and especially Bailey (played by a remarkable Nykiya Adams). Bailey is twelve and just wants to dance, but like other heroines in Arnold’s world, she’s tough and takes no shit; However, when we meet her, it’s obvious she has a poet’s soul. 

That isn’t intended to sound lushly or idiotically romantic. We see her entranced by a seagull on a bridge and you do sense there is a communion of sorts between the bird and the girl. We then meet Bug, who picks Bailey up on his motorized scooter, his sole vehicle, but hey, it works, and it’s not long before we get a portrait of Bug as paying more attention to his nuptials than his daughter, whom he kind of neglected to tell about until she finds out she’s to be a bridesmaid in the wedding. Whoops.

Bug honestly means well, but Bailey is coming into her own in a world that perhaps on the balance of things is no more dysfunctional than what passes for “normal”, but where what is often hidden from view is in plain sight. Her brother Hunter runs with a gang that dispenses vigilante justice, she has three half-siblings from her mom’s side, and her mother’s boyfriend is a psychopath.

She also has a friend in Bird, played to perfection by Franz Rogowski. At first, Bird feels like he’s going to be a European Forrest Gump or just as bad, the Magical White Guy. But his story is considerably more than that and what he represents is essentially the spirit of hope made flesh. After falling asleep in a field over a night where Bailey saw something she shouldn’t have, she wakes to a horse and then horses out to pasture. Bird appears in what seems to be a kilt and overcoat with a backpack and at first, he reads as one of those “aw, he’s so childlike” characters that one might associate with Robin Williams on an off day. Nevertheless, he persists in asking Bailey what she’s about and she definitely doesn’t trust him.

Spoilers ahead!

But she follows him to another estate complex where he knocks on a door and eventually heads for a rooftop where he seems to rest, well, bird-like. Turns out his parents used to live there and he’s trying to find them. Bailey suggests they meet the next day; she thinks she knows someone who could help.

In between that meeting, she bumps into her dad who is still pissed that Bailey is dismissive and rude to Kayleigh (Frankie Box), his betrothed and doubly pissed because he thinks she’s seeing a boy in the building. She’s grounded, but it’s not a genius take to know how little water that holds.

Suffice to say, she meets up with Bird the next day and Bailey takes him to meet her mom. Bird charms Bailey’s siblings, and when he meets Bailey’s mother (in bed with Skate, the previously mentioned psychopath), we (and he) learn that Bailey and her mother and we can presume Bug, at the time, lived across the hall from the apartment where Bird had inquired of his parents. Bailey’s mother recalls that she had a son but that the child died and the father left. 

During the course of the conversation, Skate reveals himself to be not merely sketchy, but genuinely disturbed, threatening, and abusive to all around him. He demands his tea from the youngest and Bailey tells him to get his own tea. He doesn’t take that well, and grows increasingly bent when the tea is brought and it’s not to his liking. As he grows more threatening, the family dog makes an appearance and goes for his privates. He loses control, the bedroom door closes and we’re left to assume that Bailey’s mom and her family will have pain visited upon them. 

Here’s the thing; when Bailey first meets Bird, she is caught in a kind of whirlwind. All around her, the heather is flattened by a stiff, if localized wind. We sense that the family dog didn’t just attack randomly, but seemed to be silently summoned; but Arnold keeps her cards close to her vest. 

Bailey’s mother remembered where the father went off to and Bailey suggests she and Bird call on him. In the meantime, she contacts Hunter and forwards him video she captured of Skate. He says his gang’ll pay him a visit the next day.

Earlier that morning, Bailey gets her first period and she approaches Kayleigh for help, who gives her tampons and pain medication to ease cramps. This is done so quietly, naturally, and organically where lesser films would have thrown this into sharp relief, but there’s more at work here; something mythic and allegorical.

The next day, Bailey goes to her mom’s, picks up her three half-siblings and she and Bird set out for a day by the ocean and to meet Bird’s father. In a film replete with the sense of what life as a twelve year old is like, and the - dare I say, even under Bailey’s circumstances - magic of that time, Bailey’s walking into the ocean and observing the fish under the surface carries with it the full force of what it’s like to see things for the first time as a child, tempered with the understanding that childhood is ending. It’s not some visual flourish that does it; it’s the measured approach that Arnold takes with drawing us closer into Bailey’s sense of wonder. Despite her toughness, we know that she’s in tune with what nature there is around her. The gull, the horses, the pasture, the ocean, butterflies, and flocks of birds aloft over the projects, all evoke this sense and sensibility. 

When they do meet his father, it’s sad, but not tragic. There will be no family reunion, not holiday gatherings, but at least, Bird can walk away with some closure. His mother may have had sever mental issues, perhaps she was bi-polar, but his father could no longer take being with her and left. He wasn’t sure what had happened to the son, to Bird. Word was that she died, and we might assume that Bird was given up to the state. On the way back to drop the kids off, Bird is deeply affected and as tender a moment as we’ve seen is where Bailey gently rests her head on his chest.

She is less than tender with him when they return to her mom’s neighborhood. They both know this is goodbye and Bailey toughens up again, refusing to say goodbye, though one of her younger half-sisters gives Bird a hug before they go back inside the apartment. She puts the kids to bed and we soon here her mother crying in fear telling Skate to fuck off downstairs. Skate, who’s apparently not met his retribution and is forcing his way through the front door.

Bailey tells the kids to stay put while she goes downstairs and tries to prevent Skate from likely killing her mother. Skate chokes her out and tosses her to the floor while he resumes his attack on her mother. Bird shows up and receives a battering and here’s where Arnold departs from the straightforward drama/melodrama and we enter/re-enter the mythic. Bird arises transformed and the last we see of him is as a winged avenger flying off into the night with Skate.

The next day is the wedding and it is lovely. It really is. The exchange of vows takes place in the office of the Justice of the Peace and the post-nuptial festivities are line dancing and celebrating Bug and Kayleigh’s union. Bailey has made peace with her dad and his choice of mate and she seems serene in a way that marks the transition to adolescence, if not womanhood. She wanders through the crowd and gazes at Bird backlit in the doorway to the hall. They embrace and Bailey is held in arms now wings. Out of the embrace, Bird is gone, but a young fox comes in and the credits roll.

My understanding is that as lauded as this film has been, detractors were disappointed by these notes of magical realism and I’m sorry for them. Really. In some ways, it’s a logical progression in Arnold’s oeuvre from Wasp onward, as I mentioned earlier, there is a sense of hope, of life, and a vibrancy of both in her films. I emphatically do not mean some goofy, Panglossian version of “hope” or positivity, but an earned sense of dignity in dealing with a milieu that is at the very least challenging, and more often, soul-crushing. Poverty, crimes, and drugs are the backdrop and they might define relationships, but they don’t always define people nor their futures.

This may not be born out in Arnold’s films, but just the fact that many of her characters find grace in the grime and aren’t deterred from seeking what happiness they can find is important.

Bug, played with an amalgam of fecklessness and genuine affection by Barry Keoghan (yep, turning in another rock solid performance; gee, he’s swell), really does mean to do well by his kids. When he finds out that Hunter is going to Scotland to be a dad at fourteen, he and Bailey race to the train station only to find his son dispirited that his girlfriend didn’t meet him and is going to terminate the pregnancy. Bug assures him it’s for the better; he doesn’t want to be a father at fourteen. And when Hunter reminds Bug that he had him at fourteen, Bug lets him know that sure he did, but it’s hard. He also underscored that he doesn’t regret bringing Hunter into the world. This, like other scenes, could have devolved into pure bathos, but Arnold and her players are far too invested in the material and the stark realities the form the context to perform that disservice.

Franz Rogowski, as noted above, plays Bird with depth and nuance. On first meeting, he seems a simpleton, but the richness unfolds and one feels that yes, Bird, you are too pure for this world.

Then there’s Nykiya Adams, whose take on Bailey is so true and so free of bullshit, rather like Bailey herself. It’s a marvelous piece of work and it’s going to be thrilling to see where she goes from here.

Moreover, it is a coming-of-age tale where the mythic and the mundane interpenetrate seamlessly. Allegorically, Bird’s arrival on the scene is coincident with the arrival of Bailey’s period and the film is not so literal minded to force the interpretation that “Bird is just in her head” or that it’s all forced symbolism. Nether is so. 

The beauty of it is that the wonder of what’s before Bailey is delineated so subtly and gracefully, that there’s room for more than one reading. In any case, though, Bird is a masterwork and I can’t wait to revisit Bailey and Bird again.