Good parents are a rarity in Andrea Arnold’s movies. Instead, they tend to be neglectful and preoccupied, often for solid reasons: Arnold tells stories of working-class families, mostly British, mostly struggling to get by, mostly the offspring of parents who are, themselves, distracted and uninterested in their children’s lives. An early short film of Arnold’s, “Wasp,” has a mother locking her four children in the car while she tries to woo an old boyfriend in a bar. One of her best movies, “Fish Tank,” features a mother who punishes her daughter by telling her she should have gone through with her planned abortion instead of giving birth. The situation is pretty grim.
By those standards, Bug (Barry Keoghan, covered in insect tattoos and grins) is a pretty good dad, if only because he talks to his kids. He has two of them, Hunter (Jason Buda) and Bailey (Nykiya Adams), and they live with him in a chaotic, ramshackle squat in northern Kent. Hunter is 14, born when Bug himself was 14; Bailey is 12, and getting fed up with her life. Her own mother (Jasmine Jobson) lives in another house with Bailey’s three stepsiblings.
“Bird,” which Arnold wrote and directed, is really Bailey’s story, but Bug is a key part of it. At the start of the film, he brings home a toad in a plastic shopping bag. Bailey wrinkles her nose as he explains that the toad secretes a hallucinogenic, and all they have to do is get it to secrete the drug and then sell it and then, presto, they’ll be rich! He needs the money to live, but also because, he tells her, he’s getting married this weekend.
Bailey is having none of Bug’s nonsense, but she doesn’t really know what to replace it with. She has no reference point for a different life and neither, you get the sense, does Bug. “Bird” is the story of children raising children. The complete absence of anything resembling structure is normal to them, but the feeling that the grown-ups are not really acting like grown-ups — that abuses and harms in their community are going unchecked — has gotten to the teenagers. Hunter has joined a gang of young teenage boys who call themselves “vigilantes” and will beat up a man, for instance, if he is abusing his girl.
Bailey is on the verge of puberty, and waffling between anger and depression. One day, she meets a strange man who introduces himself as Bird (Franz Rogowski). He seems different from other adults, nonthreatening and quiet and gentle. Bailey only knows how to be abrasive, but she softens toward him, and they become friends. Where did Bird come from? Why is he here? She doesn’t know, and doesn’t care all that much: To her, he represents safety, though she is not sure why.
“Bird” feels like a departure from form for Arnold, who has made a career of gritty, sometimes shocking social realism. Even her 2012 adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” interpreted that Emily Brontë novel through a naturalistic lens: It was muddy and gritty, and foregrounded class and race distinctions in a way that felt fresh and alive. People in an Arnold film are often trying to escape their circumstances, but not always clear on what they’re escaping toward.
But “Bird” hops from social realism to magical realism, a fact that takes a while to register with the audience and feels, at times, a little forced. Bird is not a figment of Bailey’s imagination, exactly, but the Bird we see onscreen is filtered through Bailey’s imagination, in ways she might not even realize. He is both a person and a stand-in for something she desperately wants, a presence she needs to feel.
That Bailey’s been raised in an essentially feral manner is part of the film’s enchantment; “Bird” is full of nature, of animals in the midst of metamorphosis or running wild. Frequently we see caterpillars and butterflies, and of course Bailey is living with a toad. But the walls of the squat are also covered in drawings of insects, as is her father. Following a literary tradition of giving characters names with deeper meanings, it’s no mistake that her brother’s name is Hunter. And so it is only natural that at the moment of coming-of-age, she’d find strength and solace in a Bird.
There’s a wealth of lovely performances in “Bird,” including Adams, who holds the film together by slowly taking on tenderness as it progresses. But the two poles of the movie are Rogowski and Keoghan, who radiate precisely opposite energies. Where Rogowski is delicate, hopping and perching like a ballet dancer, Keoghan moves like a particularly athletic bear cub, though he dances in a few scenes with both comedy and grace. (There’s some excellent humor in this film, and even an Easter egg for “Saltburn” fans.)
Yet “Bird” doesn’t linger as long in the memory as some of Arnold’s other films, probably because it feels a little less shocking, less transgressive and a bit less insightful, too. It’s cheerful at the end, a film about people who are just trying to make the best of what life handed them, something more like a fable. The villains are dispatched. Some kind of order is restored. And while it’s clear this cannot really be a happily ever after, it’s a moment of peace.
But there’s a charm here, and not just because of Rogowski’s subtly avian head bobs and tiptoe weaves. “Bird” feels warm, because it is about love and safety. It’s about realizing that your parents might just be doing the best they can, and if that’s not much, well, at least they’re trying. Near the end of the movie, it occurred to me that “Bird” would make a pretty good stage musical — not just because people always seem to be singing, but because it’s achingly, heartbreakingly sincere, and for a character living in chaos, that sincerity can feel like magic.
Bird
Rated R for loads of bad language and some disturbing scenes of domestic violence. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters.
