Bird: Andrea Arnold’s Latest Dip into Hardscrabble Lives Blends Grit and, Oddly, Magic
By Liam Lacey
B-plus
English director, Andrea Arnold, has blazed a trail with intimate films of the hardscrabble lives of young working-class women (Red Road, Fish Tank), followed by her anti-romantic adaptation of Wuthering Heights and her road movie, American Honey (2016).
She has since served as a director for hire on feminist-positive American episodic dramas (Big Little Lies, Transparent, I Love Dick) followed by her austere animal rights documentary Cow (2021). Bird, her first dramatic feature in eight years, is a change of direction, a film that starts as another gritty coming-of-age drama, which unexpectedly somersaults into a magic realist fantasy.
Bailey (Nykira Adams) seeks any solace as she endures a squalid life.
The question here is not whether the plot makes sense, but deciphering exactly what kind of sense Arnold intends to make? Twelve-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) lives in a squalid graffiti-marred council flat in Gravesend, Kent, not far from where the director grew up. Given Bailey’s propensity for recording her world on her phone’s video app, and then watching the images projected on her bedroom wall, she appears be a filmmaker in training.
She’s the only Black member of her improvised family, which includes her man-child of a father, the heavily tattooed, unemployed party animal, Bug (Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin, Saltburn), Bugs’ fiancé Kayleigh (Frankie Box) and Bug’s teen son, Hunter Jason Buda).
The film opens with a family altercation. Bugs announces he’s marrying Kayleigh on the next Saturday and he insists that Bailey dress up in the sparkly pink cat-suit that Kayleigh and her daughter are wearing for the wedding. When Bailey rejects the idea Bugs, only half-playfully, tries to wrestle her into submission. To further repudiate her future step-mother’s efforts to dress her up as a doll, she gets Hunter’s girlfriend to shave her curls off to a boyish buzzcut before running away and spending the night sleeping in a hayfield.
Pretty much everything about Bailey’s environment screams out for child welfare intervention. Not only are the hallways covered with graffiti, so are the walls inside the apartment. Bailey comes and goes as she pleases — Bug doesn’t notice she’s spent the night out.
Meanwhile, 14-year-old Hunter leads a gang who dole out vigilante justice with their fists and boots to bullies and child beaters in the neighbourhood. Later, we meet Bailey’s mother, Peyton (Jasmine Jobson) who lives in a nearby row house with three younger children, and Peyton’s belligerent boyfriend, Skate (James Nelson-Joyce), whose drug-using friends treat the living room as a drop-in center.
No wonder, this excess of ugly reality leads Bailey to want to escape, a point driven home by the post-punk anthem, Too Real, from Fontaines D.C. On the morning after sleeping in the field, Bailey awakens to find a horse nuzzling her. A moment later she sees an odd young man (German actor Franz Rogowski) with fluttery gestures, dressed in a twirling kilt and a pull-over sweater, who is staring at her.
She holds up her phone and starts taking a video of him as a warning to back off. He seems amused, and instead of retreating begins dancing for her. He introduces himself as Bird and declares he’s looking for his home. Bird is, we learn, a former child of these same public housing units where she grew up. Gradually, they become companions in exile.
Bird’s appearance marks a shift in the film and Bailey’s worldview. Arnold’s films are replete with animal imagery and here she pushes that to an extreme: There are animal tattoos, swarming seagulls, bees and butterflies, a mail-delivering crow, an apparently resurrected dog, and an ongoing comic thread, Bug’s new pet Colorado River toad, the key element in his scheme to pay off the wedding costs and other expenses, by selling off its hallucinogenic secretions.
At times, this ingratiating film, with its handheld camera and a pumped-up soundtrack and busy plotting, feels like it was born from a big old lick of that toad juice as it springs from the real to the fanciful. Throughout this process, there’s a tension to the latent creepiness of this bond between the eccentric man and the lonely pubescent girl, until Bird transforms from random weirdo to something like a guardian angel. (As well as Ken Loach’s Kes, I was reminded of the 1961 British film, Whistle Down the Wind, in which school children, including Hayley Mills, mistake an escaped fugitive for Jesus Christ.)
Beneath the soft storybook ending, there’s a hard emotional knot here in an exploration of how the scars of poverty, abuse and neglect are bound up with family love and interdependence, and how those contradictions are what prime the springs of imaginative creativity.
Bird. Directed and written by Andrea Arnold. Starring: Nykiya Adams, Franz Rogowski, Barry Keoghan, Jason Buda, James Nelson Joyce, Jasmine Jobson, Frankie Box. Bird opens in theatres on Nov. 8.