'Bird' review: Andrea Arnold's coming-of-age fable comes up slightly short

Andrea Arnold lobs everything including the kitchen sink at her latest tale of realism, though she can't quite balance its highs and lows. Bird follows a poor 12-year-old's coming-of-age in Southeast England, and her friendship with a mysterious stranger. It's as much about grimy, tangible details as it is about ethereal ideas of what the lens can (and cannot) see, but this self-reflexivity is, at once, the movie's most breathtaking facet, as well as its undoing.

Arnold has long employed a roving lens to explore rural and suburban landscapes. Bird, her first fiction film is nearly a decade, is no exception, though she affords herself too much aesthetic liberty at times. This time around, her handheld style is more chaotic than exploratory. It often obscures more than it reveals. However, her actors help her in capturing just enough vulnerability to make up for this misstep.

The film doesn't quite fit together, but its individual pieces can be dazzling. Some even border on the divine, and they work to remind us that even a lesser Arnold is still a cut above most people's best.

What is Bird about?

Credit: Atsushi Nishijima / Courtesy of MUBI

Hard-as-nails Bailey (newcomer Nykiya Adams), a 12-year-old biracial Black girl, lives with her young, wayward white father, Bug (Barry Keoghan, Saltburn), in a dilapidated apartment project in Kent, England. In fact, their town is called Gravesend, a murky name that echoes their dead-end prospects, though this doesn't stop Bug from planning a wedding celebration he can't afford. To Bailey's chagrin, Bug's girlfriend of three months and now fiancée, Kayleigh (Frankie Box), is about to move into their home with her infant daughter. The pre-teen lashes out, and attempts to join the vigilante gang run by her 14-year-old half-brother, Hunter (Jason Buda).

Arnold often takes an oblique, blink-and-you'll-miss-it approach to establishing some of these relationships, which often come to light through quick and muffled dialogue. This is, in essence, the point. It can be initially hard to tell whether the heavily tattooed, high-energy Bug is Bailey's father or her sibling, or where Bug and Hunter are related at all — they barely share the screen — which speaks to how young and ill-prepared Bug is for fatherhood, and the family's fractured nature.

Hunter and his scrawny friends try to take the law into their own hands by attacking domestic abusers and recording their assaults for social media, and while this could make its own intriguing feature, it's but a passing detail in Arnold's jagged-edged world — for better or worse. While it does eventually pay off in the plot (and has at least glancing thematic relevance), it can't help but feel like a morally intriguing aspect of Bailey's story has gone unexplored.

After Bailey is ousted from these missions for her safety, she comes across an awkward, friendly figure who goes only by the name Bird (Franz Rogowski, Passages). Bird claims to have come to Gravesend to track down his parents, from whom he was separated as a child. In keeping with the film's persistent issue, this saga is also sidelined as soon as it gets interesting, but the ephemeral nature of Bird's arrival is, in its own way, wondrous.

Franz Rogowski brings a shimmering warmth to Bird.

Credit: Robbie Ryan / Courtesy of MUBI

From the moment he appears, Rogowski's soft physicality brings dazzling contrast to Bailey's rough-and-tumble world, building intrigue in the process. Their initial connection is built on commonalities; Bird defies gender binaries with his lengthy skirt, as does Bailey with her short hair and boisterous attitude, and they happen to meet in the wide-open isolation of a lonely field, as if they're each escaping from something. However, Bird also represents a sense of wide-eyed possibility that Bailey's surroundings don't often allow her to feel.

Something as simple as Bird's quiet smile, and his seeming friendly demeanor with no ulterior motives, feels entirely alien to Bailey, though it might to most people. Rogowski plays Bird with one eye towards rejecting all things cynical, whether to maintain optimism about his familial search or simply because this is some innate quality Bird happens to possess.

Bird often rides the line between character and idealistic symbol, especially when Bailey begins capturing him with her phone camera, and projecting his images on her bedroom wall. On occasion, he'll stand perched on the roof of a nearby building, unmoving, looking down at her like an angelic being. The way he carries himself is beautiful and breathtaking. He's a breath of fresh air that Bailey and the movie sorely need.

Bird is almost self-reflexive about its images — but not quite.

Credit: Courtesy of MUBI

Unfortunately, Bailey's proclivity for capturing scenery is yet another idea left unexplored, even though Bird is at its most potent when dipping its toe into her perspective. Her pictures and videos are gentle in a way her surroundings are not, and the question of whether she's projecting this gentleness out into the world or finding it in places others might not seek it remains largely untouched.

Arnold is usually adept at capturing the rhythms and invisible hues of any place she films, but her framing here is often so off-kilter as to be nauseating. Bird is too quick and chaotic to ever ruminate on its images — Arnold's own, or the ones she creates for Bailey — which makes her protagonist's own point of view feel fleeting, even when the movie delves further into her family.  

However, Bird's enigmatic presence, as briefly seen through Bailey's eyes, is just alluring enough, and allows Arnold to keep an observational distance without the movie coming apart at the seams. Along the way, as teenage drama comes to the fore, it's also complemented by strange happenings verging on magical realism, thanks to the strange behavior of animals. While these can be chalked up to coincidental oddities, they're framed with just enough mischief to pose delightful doubts about the movie's true nature.

Whether or not Bird represents or possesses some kind of divinity is practically irrelevant in the face of whether or not Bailey can recognize this or capture it. However, rather than exploring its latent symbolism, the film soon begins straying into awfully literal territory. It can't seem to maintain its sense of mystery for very long. In the process, even its most life-affirming moments tend to lose their impact, even though Rogowski's otherworldliness is a marvel to behold.

Bird is now in theaters.

UPDATE: Nov. 8, 2024, 9:19 a.m. EST Bird was originally reviewed out of its NewFest premiere in New York. This article has been republished for its theatrical debut.