Film Review: Araki matures with ‘White Bird in a Blizzard’
It often feels as though low-budget filmmakers who work their way into the “higher” brackets end up losing all the distinctive characteristics that brought them attention in the first place. That’s true with indie filmmaker Gregg Araki, but in his case it’s a good thing — for me, at least. His ultra-low-budget early movies — like “Three Bewildered People in the Night” (1987) and “The Long Weekend (O’ Despair)” (1989) — more or less delivered on their irritating titles: That is, they drove me out of the screening room.
The titles of his more recent work — including the hilarious Anna Faris-centric “Smiley Face” (2007) and the enjoyably goofy, deadpan “Kaboom!” (2010) — suggest that he has lightened up, and all for the better.
When I first saw the name of his latest — “White Bird in a Blizzard” — I thought, “Uh-oh, getting overly serious again.” But, while it is the least comic work he’s released in a decade, it never feels either contrived or mundane.
At the start of the movie, Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) tells us about the day her mother went missing. Did Mom run off with a lover, fall off a cliff, get murdered or kidnapped for who-knows-what reason?
The title refers to the second most important character in the story — Kat’s mother, Eve (Eva Green) — who appears in both flashbacks and in Kat’s dreams. In the latter, she’s dressed in all white and wandering through a snowstorm, nearby but somehow infinitely distant — unreachable.
The local police investigation is halfhearted, and Kat’s dad Brock (Christopher Meloni) seems too shellshocked to push for more. He stands around rigidly and, like Kat, seems intent on forgetting about Eve altogether. Kat — who is in her late teens — gets involved with the head cop on the case (Thomas Jane). Since Kat has written her Mom off for deserting the family, this affair is less a ploy to get more attention paid to the investigation than it is to get away from her current boyfriend (Shiloh Fernandez), a hunky dope, who is growing increasingly awkward with her.
Kat’s disdainful response to Mom’s vanishing keeps her from suspecting possibilities that are crystal clear to her closest friends (Gabourey Sidibe and Mark Indelicato), who mock themselves as being too much of a cliche — the fat girl and the gay best friend.
Many things are as apparent to the audience as to the friends, but toward the end, the plot twists in the best way; that is, there have been tiny hints all along but obscured so we’ll remember them at the end without having put them together properly along the way.
Woodley — best known as George Clooney’s elder daughter in “The Descendants” — fares much better here than in the Young-Adult-Series-Opener-Trying-to-Be-the-Next-Hunger-Games “Divergent.” Green gets to play way against type, as the sexually and emotionally desperate housewife — one of the generation that had their planned futures turned upside-down by feminism and other social upheavals.
It may not be the cheeriest film Araki has done, but it’s certainly the most meticulously assembled.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).