Critics reviews

Edmands makes the film his own. The feel is much more local and provincial in Bluebird than in The Sweet Hereafter. The ambient C & W music (Conway Twitty, Patsy Cline, Joe Tex, for starters) inside bar, diner, and vehicles captures the mood of isolated outposts like this one. Updating a norm from classic Hollywood movies, he highlights atonement.

Edmands' scenario provides plenty of opportunity for narrative twists and social commentary, but these aren't the areas of interest for the filmmaker. Rather, he's interested in the people, and what they look like, how they behave, as they cope, or fail to cope. The resolution of the film doesn't come in the form of a "eureka" moment in the investigation... It comes in the looks on the faces of the characters as they make the determination to try to live their lives.

Featuring some beautiful, quietly arresting snow-covered images caught on celluloid, Bluebird is welcomingly familiar while finding a way to personalize and deepen its exploration of domestic pathos.

Earnestly well-intentioned and doggedly uncommercial, this is the kind of film that's worth rooting for in principle, but a solid cast and evocative 35 mm photography can't compensate for its slightly stultifying familiarity.

What a shame that the first film to star venerable stage actress (and longtime Steppenwolf member) Amy Morton is this terminally arty drama, set in a Maine logging town where everyone acts like a character from Cries and Whispers. The inhabitants are so sluggish and morose that they seem to be marking time until tragedy occurs.

This debut feature by writer-director Lance Edmands benefits from the dark mood created by cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes (Martha Marcy May Marlene) and impressive performances from the cast. But the characters' personal struggles are so singular that this feels like a collection of vignettes instead of a continuous film; by the time Edmands checks in with the little boy, you may have forgotten that he's where it all began, and several loose ends never get tied up.

The setting of Lance Edmands's polished yet plodding Bluebird—a frozen, industrial town in Maine—creates an ideally insular arena from which to observe the lives of its residents. Edmands moves his emotionally confused pawns around a wintry milieu that has nothing to give its citizens beyond copious lumber and dreary futures—the landscape made even chillier by Jody Lee Lipes's elegant yet predictably blue-hued lensing.