Reseñas de la crítica

[R]ather than focusing on tears and soft-focus memories as many films about loss do, The Starling takes a very practical approach to exploring the process of readjustment. With Jack and Lilly on very different journeys, most viewers will find something they can relate to, whilst wondering if the couple are going to be able to save their marriage (and, indeed, if they should be trying to). It's a mature approach to the subject which is long overdue.

Not only are the jokes in Matt Harris’s script badly timed, but they’re also largely incomprehensible – there’s an extended bit about a leg-humping dog and several caricatures of the mentally ill that all feel like half-remembered approximations of Oscar bait.

Blatant product placement, unconvincing bird effects and awful soundtrack selections all undermine a potentially wrenching, difficult premise with utter bogusness.

Although The Starling may not be quite up to the standards set by those [1980s] classic tear-jerkers, the enjoyment of watching this modest melodrama is implicitly connected to a giddy acknowledgement that there remains a bold class of film-maker willing to blow $20 million on a low-key tale of grief for grown-ups.

The metaphor at the center of the film is that starlings are monogamous birds that mate for life, so we know that Lily and Jack will work through this rough patch. But starlings are also an invasive species in North America, introduced in 1890 by the American Acclimatization Society, dedicated to introducing European flora and fauna to North America. These birds are known for ravaging crops and forcing out native bird species around the country. Building an entire metaphor for relationships around such a bird is about as misbegotten as the film’s execution itself.

This bizarre sentimental dramedy is fatuous and phoney in every particular: a quite extraordinary festival of gibberish. Every implausible scene, every unconvincing character, every contrived dollop of symbolism, every toe-curlingly misjudged and unearned emotional climax seems as if it has been concocted in some secret bio-warfare lab for assaulting your mind with pure, toxic nonsense.

Losing a child is the kind of pain unimaginable to those who have never had the misfortune, but here it feels familiar from countless other films on the subject, its ugliest truths softened with cute visual shorthand, a stringy, positively suffocating score by Benjamin Wallfisch, and the kind of tidy, teary therapy-speak that you never actually hear in therapy. It’s easy enough to watch, thanks largely to its leading lady’s reliably buoyant charisma, but you can’t help thinking it should be harder.

With a predictable trajectory and cringeworthy metaphors, The Starling is so slushily sentimental it makes the typical tearjerker look like a noir. Despite the lived-in performances from its three high-profile stars, this attempt at heartfelt drama is hopelessly by-the-numbers.

Harris’ script and Melfi’s workmanlike direction move toward predictable ends, including a sequence involving a number of packages of baked goods that seem to be pulled from some sort of “quirky dramedy” Big Book of Ideas, but that doesn’t rob the film of doing what it aims to do: give us cinematic comfort food, with a bird on it to boot.