Your tolerance for writer/ director Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard hinges on your appreciation (or lack thereof ) for campy content. If you were weaned on John Waters, you’ll gobble up every cheese-tastic second, from a horny housewife lusting towards her daughter’s boyfriend to Christopher Meloni’s Yosemite Sam mustache. If you’re intolerant of goofy tomfoolery, you won’t survive dialogue like, “In the blink of an eye, my virginity was gone. Just like my mother.”
Based on a 1999 novel by Laura Kasischke, White Bird is simultaneously a coming-of-age tale and a missing person mystery, a nonsensical combination if ever there was one. Kat (Shailene Woodley) is a high schooler stumbling into sexuality right at the point when her mother, Eve (Eva Green), disappears. Her father (Meloni) is a Willy Loman-esque sad sack who greets his wife’s disappearance with a sniveling, “She never loved me.” Through flashbacks, we see that Eve was more Mommy Dearest than “mother of the year.”
Green vamps and camps it up, skewering the daughter she envies with statements like, “You look just like I did when I was you.” The film may be set in 1988, but Eve is all exploding 1950s suburban housewife, drunkenly yelling things like “I will not be dismissed by the likes of you!” Kat could care less that her mother vanishes, as she’s too busy relishing her bellyflop into sexual activity, which includes the seduction of a 40-something-year-old cop (Thomas Jane). As the movie lurches along, the only constant is sultry and sexual silliness.
For campy content to work it has to be presented with the utmost sincerity, and oh holy crap is Araki sincere. Surreal dream sequences and faux profound symbolic moments relentlessly pound viewers. You can tell Araki thought he would blow minds with moments like when Kat dreams of her mom’s hands dissolving while she does the dishes. No one, neither the people who made the film nor the characters who appear in it, have ever even heard of the word subtle. Love it or hate it, this is all by design.
In 2014, Green declared herself the unquestioned Queen of Cheese, following up her smoldering kitsch in Sin City: A Dame to Kill For and 300: Rise of an Empire with this epically borked performance. However prepared you may feel for the final dream sequence that reveals the meaning of the title, I promise that you aren’t. Judging a film like this is tough because traditional rules don’t apply; performances aren’t gauged on depth or sincerity and the dialogue was specifically engineered to induce groans. It’s all a matter of taste, specifically a taste for tastelessness.
White Bird in a Blizzard is technically awful, intentionally tacky and, for me, pretty dang fun. More amusing than most comedies and more entertaining than many dramas, this pitch perfect example of an infrequently used genre did it for me, but I make no promises about what it will do for you.
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