Best Intentions
If The Holocaust is news to you, ‘White Bird’ might be enlightening. Might.
White Bird: A Wonder Story
Director: Marc Forster • Writer: Mark Bomback, based on the book by RJ Palacio
Starring: Helen Mirren, Ariella Glaser, Orlando Schwerdt, Gillian Anderson, Bryce Gheisar
USA • 2hrs 1min
Opens Hong Kong Oct 24 • IIA
Grade: B-
Deep down director Marc Forster is a sentimentalist (Finding Neverland, The Kite Runner, A Man Called Otto) when he’s not half-assing some action (Quantum of Solace, World War Z). The problem with his brand of sentimenality is that he tends to soft-pedal the uglier parts of life. The Kite Runner pivots on child rape in pre-Soviet Afghanistan, and that critical scene isn’t exactly as harrowing as it should be. His remake of Otto tones down Otto’s racist tendencies to make him just kind of cranky. Forster is a great technician but he’s yet to find a way back to the tricky thematic nuance of his breakout Monster’s Ball.
So a movie about a French Jewish girl hiding in a barn for two years during the Second World War à la Anne Frank, part of a story told to teach a privileged Manhattan kid about bullying and kindness (da fuq?) is right up Forster’s alley for all the wrong reasons. Setting aside the fact that being “kind” is not what people who resisted systematic murder by the Nazis in 1940s France were doing – that shit is way beyond kindness – using the Holocaust as a metaphor for niceness is gross. But White Bird: A Wonder Story is cut from the same manipulative, schmaltzy cloth as Wonder, the 2017 goopfest about a kid with a facial deformity overcoming prejudice and, yes, bullying. No duh it has the same manipulative, schmaltzy vibe, rendering it Holocaust 101 for kindergarteners. At a time when anti-Semitism is rising – and Israel pounding Gaza is a different issue, don’t even try – movies like White Bird need to do better.
Some of the gross schmaltz must be laid at the feel of author RJ Palacio, whose book White Bird is based on. I’m all for teaching kids about history, but there’s a limit to how much should be sanitised for young minds. Then again, is Zone of Interest really a good start for kids getting told no, Twitter is wrong and The Holocaust was not a hoax?
We meet up with Julian Albans (Bryce Gheisar), little Auggie’s primary shithead bully in Wonder, on his first day at a new fancy prep school. Recall, he got tossed out of the other school for being a shithead bully. At lunch he finds himself the same kind of victim as Auggie and 17 million Jews and other “undesirables” because the cool kid says he’s sitting at the loser’s table. Don’t hurt yourself on that reach there, Palacio. Anyway, he goes home to find his absent, wealthy parents have left him some ready-made Beef bourguignon for dinner (my heart is breaking here) to microwave on his own. But lo, Grandmère (Helen Mirren), renowned artist Sara Blum is in town for a show at the Met, and clocking his pouty, teen surliness she proceeds to tell him about her childhood in occupied France.
Sara grew up in one of those provincial Gallic villages where everyone speaks English. Her math teacher mother Rose (Olivia Ross) and doctor dad Max (Ishai Golan) did their best to shield the blissfully ignorant teen (Ariella Glaser) from the Nazi threat, ultimately failing when their town is occupied. When Sara’s separated from her family a classmate, Julien Beaumier (Orlando Schwerdt), a recovered polio afflictee because the 1940s are pre-vaccine, shelters her from the Nazis. You see, he’s kind to her despite being on the crap end of a school bullying campaign for his limp.
Admittedly I’m coming down a bit hard on Palacio, as you could argue the natural next step of bullying powered by entitlement and irrational hatred is fascism, but Mark Bomback’s facile script isn’t sophisticated enough to make those connections. While there is some attempt to shade Sara in her youth – she was a teenaged girl more interested in boys and new shoes than current events – Julien is saintly, his parents Vivienne and Jean-Paul (Gillian Anderson, deep into the Accent Phase of her career, and Jo Stone-Fewings) are a close second. Sara’s former crush, Vincent (Jem Matthews), drinks the Nazi Kool-Aid but we never get any insight as to what made millions of otherwise normal folks do so. Sara gets a grip, there’s an action-packed third act tragedy (again, no duh), and 21st century Julian becomes a new man over dinner and picks up the school nerd’s dropped papers the next day. Nazism is over. White Bird is a handsomely mounted film, well-intentioned, well-acted and loaded with cues in a bloated, cudgel of a score (by Thomas Newman) that will help children differentiate right from wrong. It’s as good a place to start as any.