Teaching a schoolboy bully the error of his ways by telling him about the Holocaust seems a bit like aiming at a gnat with a cannon, but White Bird aims away all the same.
Straddling 2017’s Wonder as both a prequel and sequel — with both films based on novels by R.J. Palacio — White Bird means well, but cannot match its predecessor’s subtlety in delivering a tear-jerking “choose kindness” moral. Not surprising, given that the earlier film’s oppressor was a mean fifth-grader and the villain this time around is the Third Reich.
That mean fifth-grader, Julian (Bryce Gheisar), is attending a new school in New York City after being expelled from his last one, and his new plan is not to be cruel, not to be nice, just to blend in and be inconspicuous. This strategy appalls his beloved grandmother Sara (Mirren), who sits Julian down to discuss a subject she usually avoids, namely her youth in France in the 1940s. Young Sara (Ariella Glaser) was a talented artist, but also spoiled and vain and oblivious to the fact that her classmates are cruel to Julien (Orlando Schwerdt, True History of the Kelly Gang), who walks with a brace and a crutch after a bout of childhood polio.
Sara and her family are Jewish, but they think they’re safe from the Nazis as residents of a pastoral town in Free France; eventually, the Reich rears its ugly head, rounding up all of the local Jewish population. When the school’s Jewish students are swept up, Sara manages to hide; Julien sneaks her away to his family’s barn, where she will live for the next several years, under the loving watch of Julien and his parents (Gillian Anderson, Jo Stone-Fewings).
Sara’s narrative doesn’t center her path toward learning to appreciate Julien; it instead honors the courage of Julien and his family in standing up to the Nazis and providing her shelter. It’s a story whose power is matched only in its familiarity, starting with The Diary of Anne Frank and The Hiding Place and then reiterated numerous times since in film, television, and literature. The project is fortunate to have Helen Mirren to ease the tension of any seeming repetition; she wields the blunt-force messaging with delicacy.
Director Marc Forster has assembled an impressive team of craftspeople to support his cast: Jenny Beavan’s costumes play an essential role in aging Sara and Julien from adolescence to young adulthood; Matthias Koenigswieser’s camera finds every shaft of light that streams in between the slats of that barn. Yet the filmmaker and screenwriter Mark Bomback (The Art of Racing in the Rain) marry the handsome production to directorial and script choices that, for all their attempted restraint, lean toward the obvious, the blatant, and the sentimental.
Bomback’s script flirts with the ludicrous, too, as in a sequence involving a wildly improbable rescue from a Nazi who chases Sara through a forest. Whether or not this sequence of events took place in Palacio’s novel, it seems incomprehensible that the screenwriter wrote it, that the director shot it, that the editor left it in, and that no producer ever questioned it. Whatever narrative heft White Bird might have possessed up to that moment immediately evaporates, which might explain why Lionsgate has plopped the film into US theaters with little fanfare after it has already screened in several international territories.
The film’s intentions are unquestionably noble, but the execution falls wildly short, even with so many talented artists involved. There have been, and no doubt will be, far superior ways to teach young people about kindness and about World War II than this well-intentioned but sappy exercise.
Director: Marc Forster
Screenwriter: Mark Bomback, based on the novel by R.J. Palacio
Cast: Ariella Glaser, Orlando Schwerdt, Bryce Gheisar, Gillian Anderson, Helen Mirren
Producers: Todd Lieberman, David Hoberman, R.J. Palacio
Executive producers: Mark Bomback, Connor DiGregorio, Andrew Erwin, Jon Erwin, Robert Kessel, Jeff Skoll, Kevan Van Thompson, Renée Wolfe, Christopher Woodrow, Alexander Young
Director of photography: Matthias Koenigswieser
Production design: Jennifer Williams
Costume design: Jenny Beavan
Editing: Matt Chesse
Music: Thomas Newman
Sound design: William Files, P.K. Hooker, sound designers/supervising sound editors
Production companies: Lionsgate, Participant Media, Mandeville Films, 2DUX2
In English
120 minutes
