Kritiken

In The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars, Woodley plays kind, idealistic, but hardly naive young women who find actualization through romantic love. One of the more compelling things about White Bird is how it plays with and against Woodley's screen persona from those other films... [In White Bird,] Araki exploits Woodley's inherent sympathy so well that you might not realize it at first. The gradual revelation of the character's awfulness is but one trick White Bird has up its sleeve.

Robin Guthrie and Harold Budd's understandably Cocteau Twins-esque score helps set the 1988 opening stages, Araki's taste for richly saturated colors remains intact and the music cues, video game consoles Depeche Mode posters, and other period signifiers are as carefully chosen and spotlighted as those in Mysterious Skin... [But] with White Bird‘s central mystery mostly backgrounded, the unevenness of the main narrative thrust's daily life segments weakens the impact considerably.

Araki's ending to White Bird is a radical departure from that in the source novel (which I haven't read), apparently, and will not surprise anyone who's seen any of his films before. What is unexpected is the director's deep empathy for and curiosity about the impossibly fraught nature of relationships between mothers and daughters. He may bungle the topic often in White Bird, especially in Eve's outlandish caricature, but the final minutes of the film disclose a profound filial reckoning.

White Bird in a Blizzard shares the 1980s setting and music of Araki's great 2005 film Mysterious Skin as well as its viewpoint of suburbia as a ragged landscape of mislaid trust and loneliness. But whereas the latter crescendos to a conclusion that could hardly be more gut-wrenching and cathartic, White Bird sort of fizzles away into the static white emptiness of its own blizzard.

The mother's disappearance is both a curse and a blessing, it seems: The daughter can fill the woman's psyche with her own hopes, dreams, and fears. And so, those obvious connections being forged, it seems, may just be illusions. That might explain why White Bird in a Blizzardtries so hard to walk a fine line between beguiling subtlety and frustrating, even intentional obviousness. And also why it sometimes strays too far from that line to truly succeed.

Extremely literary voice-over narration suggests that the novel, written by Laura Kasischke, relies largely on Kat's internal monologue, making it a tricky source for adaptation. Using only tiny snippets of it, the movie sometimes seems like it's just an excuse for Araki to restore his serious-filmmaker credibility while spinning some choice Cure and Joy Division tracks.

[Araki's] goal seems to be to investigate the anxious air — the resentments, the disappointments, the secrets — between the members of this broken family. If the results are occasionally broad and schematic, the actors (Woodley especially) are anything but, and Araki has an absolute field day adorning his kitschy, 1950s-ish view of suburban Los Angeles with a string of showoffy colors.

There are problems here, mainly stemming from Araki's nostalgic lushness being an awkward match for Laura Kasischke's 1999 source material, a missing-person story. But anyone who's ever longed to fill holes in a dysfunctional household might feel a resonance here; romps in Kat's poster-adorned bedroom come with the ache of a world tipping sideways.

White Bird in a Blizzard is missing an essential pulse; there's no friction to it, and, as beautiful as the film can be, it's hard to forget that you've seen all of this before, in movies like The Ice Storm,American Beauty, and Donnie Darko, all of which had more charismatic heroes. Woodley, who showed promise in The Spectacular Now, can't find a way to play recessive uncertainty without seeming recessive and uncertain as a performer.

Somewhere between an interesting character study and an effective pastiche. I found it enjoyable enough while I was watching it—quite funny and smart in places—but it left a bad taste on my palate afterward, not least for its ultimate "reveal," which felt too much like a cheap punch-line and negated the sense of mystery that the film had sustained up to that point—what David Lynch aptly described as "killing the golden goose.

This is a Greg Araki movie, one of his very best – the forces of darkness are close to us, in the apparently safe haven of the familiar. Araki reveals what was lurking behind the apparent provocation of his earlier work – an ethical project that subjects the twists, turns and foibles of American life to a critical, yet generous gaze. The kids will walk free – but they have inherited from the world built by their parents, and it's their responsibility now to build one on their own.

What we get is disappointing: a watered-down bad-taste exercise in which neither Araki's lurid affectations nor the source material's youthful angst do much to enhance each other... The result is a compromised provocation: sufficiently aware of the narrative's generational appeal to tone down its act, but falling some way short of actual emotional engagement.