White Bird

by Mike McGranaghan

White Bird is being marketed as “a Wonder story,” referring to the hit film from 2017. That’s a stretch even Stretch Armstrong couldn’t pull off. Both films are based on books by author R.J. Palacio. Otherwise, the only connection is a very brief reference to White Bird’s instigating character getting kicked out of his old school for picking on the facially disfigured boy Jacob Tremblay played in Wonder. I guess the studio’s marketing department figured it would be too difficult to sell a teen-centered Holocaust drama without some connection to a box office success.

Julian Albans (Bryce Gheisar) is the bully. He comes home one afternoon to find grandmother Sara (Helen Mirren) there. Dismayed by his cruel behavior, she tells him the story of growing up in Nazi-occupied France. The young Sara (Ariella Glaser) is a 15-year-old girl who manages to get away when the Germans round up all the Jews at her school. Her escape is aided by Julien Beaumier (Orlando Schwerdt), a classmate with polio frequently targeted for mockery by his peers. He hides her in his family’s barn, while she waits to learn what fate befell her missing parents.

There are two stories being told simultaneously in White Bird. One is about what it’s like to be a Jewish teen during Hitler’s rise. Several scenes produce gripping drama, especially the one where the school’s teachers try to prevent the Nazis from removing their students. Watching Sara flee what would certainly be an unpleasant outcome goes a long way in driving home the specific traumas adolescents faced during that time. They were not immune from the horror. Another tense sequence finds Sara being stalked by three male peers who have been drafted into the German cause.

The second story is one of friendship, teetering on romance. Julien has no reason to help Sara, yet he does. The two grow close as a result. That idea could play nicely off the occupation stuff, except that the film is riddled with cliched dialogue and relies on a recurring flight of fancy that’s tonally out of sync with the subject matter. Julien and Sara repeatedly sit in an old car that’s in the barn, then imagine themselves driving through various locales, like the African plains and Manhattan. Elaborate CGI is used to show viewers what they’re imagining in their minds. There are too many of these sequences, they go on too long, and they feel as though they’re wandering in from some other movie.

Marrying a deadly serious topic like the rise of Nazism with fantasy elements is always a risky proposition. Few movies can pull it off. (Jojo Rabbit is among those to marginally succeed.) White Bird has the noble goal of trying to suggest that acts of kindness go an especially long way during the darkest of times. Director Marc Forster (A Man Called Otto) fails to hit the correct balance, resulting in a movie that feels serious and grim one minute, then artificially light and cheery the next.

It likely goes without saying that Helen Mirren is excellent as the older Sara. Her younger co-stars are good, too, particularly Glaser, who sells the psychological torment of Sara spending a year hiding in a barn without her parents. The performances are there, and the intentions are admirable, but White Bird is ultimately too uneven to be satisfying. When half the film is riveting and the other half middling, you start to resent the constant intrusion of the weaker material.

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