Movie Review: White Bird In A Blizzard (2014)

A mystery and psychological drama, White Bird In A Blizzard combines dysfunctional family issues with burgeoning lust cutting across generations.

In a small suburban town, the world of 17 year old Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) is upended when her mother Eve (Eva Green) suddenly disappears. Kat's father Brock (Christopher Meloni) is equally stunned, while her stoner boyfriend Phil (Shiloh Fernandez) makes matters worse by immediately losing interest in intimacy.

In flashbacks Kat recalls the loveless marriage between her parents, with Eve an emotionally suffocated stay-at-home mother sensing her life slipping away. She grows increasingly resentful as Kat blossoms into the woman she once was, and Eve starts to exhibit an uncomfortable sexual interest in Phil. Back in the present, Kat is dealing with her anguish by meeting with therapist Dr. Thaler (Angela Bassett) and planning a seduction of hunky Detective Scieziesciez (Thomas Jane), who is investigating the disappearance case.

An independent production written, directed and co-produced by Gregg Araki, White Bird In A Blizzard boasts Shailene Woodley in fine form, but otherwise suffers from graceless execution. While the slow revelation of Eve's mystery and the accompanying interpersonal complexities swirling around Kat hold some interest, the emotions are often too close to the surface, and many scenes land with amateurish awkwardness. Phil's "I'm looking for the cat" poolside routine with Eve purring at him borders on a porn parody.

Which is unfortunate, because the film touches on several worthwhile themes. Eve (the name representing womanhood) is struggling with an unappreciated life spent serving her husband, the vitality of youth now a long lost memory. And Araki presents a relatively original take on the mother-daughter bond, here Eve descending into outright jealousy and embarking on a Mrs. Robinson quest to entrap Kat's boyfriend Phil. Meanwhile Kat is mimicking her mother's tendencies to seek sexual thrills across generations with Scieziesciez.

But most of the narrative arcs are eventually abandoned, and many other threads fall flat. The therapist sessions are an utter waste of Angela Bassett, Kat's high school friends suffer from wedged-in diversity, and the entire rushed third act, set two years after Eve's disappearance, emits a first draft stink. A late twist is inconsistent with everything preceding it but is nevertheless presented with dumbfounding dispassion.

White Bird In A Blizzard occasionally flutters but mostly disappears against the horizon.

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Movie Review: Kingdom Of Heaven (2005)

A historical epic based on real events, Kingdom Of Heaven is ambitious in scope and thoughtfully examines turmoil in the Holy Land during the Crusades. While the politics and battles are engaging, the film lacks emotional depth.

It's 1184, about a hundred years after the first wave of crusaders established a Kingdom in Jerusalem. Balian (Orlando Bloom), a blacksmith in the French countryside, has just suffered the loss of his wife through suicide. He reconnects with his father, the respected Baron Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson), a crusader making his way back to the Holy Land. Godfrey is wounded in a skirmish along the way, but Balian makes it to Jerusalem, where he finds the Leper King Baldwin (Edward Norton) ruling Jerusalem by allowing peaceful coexistence among all faiths and maintaining hold of a tenuous peace with Saracen leader Saladin (Ghassan Massoud).

The Marshal of Jerusalem Tiberias (Jeremy Irons) is an ally of the King, but the Knights Templar, under the leadership of Guy de Lusignan (Marton Csokas) and Raynald of Châtillon (Brendan Gleeson) are blood thirsty and power hungry, eager to set off a war with Saladin to impose Christian rule. To complicate matters, Guy is married to Baldwin's sister Sibylla (Eva Green). Balian settles down to working his father's lands, but with the Knights agitating for a war and Baldwin in ailing health, peace in the Holy Land is about to crumble.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Kingdom Of Heaven combines grand scenes of battle with an individual quest for life's true purpose. The film is passable both as a spectacle and a human drama, but never soars in either direction. Balian's story is interesting but never breaks through to a genuine level of engagement, while the army clashes are intense but often disintegrate into extras being thrown into a meat grinder.

At 144 minutes in length (with a much longer Director's Cut also available), the film is ambitious but doesn't create enough of a central drama to sustain its weight. Balian's story is a search for an objective after he loses his wife and commits murder in a rage, and his ponderous self-reflection does not always sit well in the context of massive historical events. It does not help that most of the dialogue is delivered with self-conscious importance, as if the characters knew they were partaking in events that would one day be chronicled in an important movie.

The rather unimaginative cast is adequate without threatening to compete with the grand sets and historical occasions. Orlando Bloom and Eva Green are promoted beyond their abilities to the front of a large production, and are not helped by an ill-defined and truncated romantic sub-plot. Liam Neeson, Jeremy Irons and Edward Norton carry better gravitas but are unfortunately confined to smallish roles.

The film reaches a highlight with Saladin's siege of Jerusalem, the outnumbered Balian organizing a clever defence, his objective not so much victory but the carving out of a bargaining opportunity. Scott excels at quite stunning scenes of massive armies on the move, long range and close combat action, and city walls being grimly contested to the death.

Screenwriter William Monahan does not try to disguise the film's noble intentions: the Holy Land has been a place of strife and religiously-motivated slaughter for millennia, and the path of peace can only be plotted by characters like the righteous knight Godfrey, the brave blacksmith Balian, and the benevolent King Baldwin. They have their flaws, but they all look past the individual towards the collective and seek accommodation in search of the greater good. Alas, evil co-exists in plain sight, possessing small minds but great power. The bad guys are embodied by Guy and Raynald, and the religious zealots do enough to topple the fragile peace from its perch and reignite war.

Kingdom Of Heaven is a glossy treatment of a sensitive subject, and ultimately goes out of its way to confirm the obvious: in this part of the world the names, affiliations and weapons will change, but violence in the name of God prevails across generations.

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