When you are watching an Andrea Arnold film, you know. She does not have a formula, but she leaves her fingerprints on all of her movies. Her focus is typically on characters living on the margins; she uses a lot of handheld shots, often casts an unknown as a lead, and most distinctively, she drops you into her characters’ lives in a way that makes you feel like you fell from the sky. “Keep up,” she seems to be saying. If you can immerse yourself in Arnold’s films and accept the challenge, the rewards are beyond handsome. Her mixture of naturalism and dizzying camera work has built one of the more impressive resumes of any director currently active in film. Fish Tank (her breakthrough film), Wuthering Heights (which is not your dad’s BBC production, to say the least), American Honey, and now Bird is a testament to her artistic ability and her uncompromising spirit.
Like Fish Tank and American Honey, Bird has a “name actor” in the film. Where Fish Tank had Michael Fassbender, and American Honey had Shia LaBeouf and Riley Keough, Bird has Barry Keoghan. However, at the heart of all three of those films is a first-time actor in the leading role. It says something about Arnold that actors with cache are willing to be in her movies supporting a complete unknown, but let’s just say Arnold knows how to pick ‘em when it comes to newcomers. In Fish Tank and American Honey, Katie Jarvis, and Sasha Lane were tremendous finds. You can now add Nykiya Adams in Bird as Bailey, a 12-year-old girl dealing with circumstances no child should have to manage, to Arnold’s list of discoveries.
Bailey lives in England with her dad, “Bug” (Keoghan), a low-level drug dealer who collects giant toads that secrete a hallucinogenic substance if moved by the right song (I make none of this up). Two of the tracks that Bug goes through in an attempt to get those toads to unload are “Yellow” by Coldplay and “The Universal” by Blur. At one point, Bug suggests “Murder on the Dancefloor,” a cheeky reference to Keoghan’s polarizing film Saltburn. Despite his profession, Bug is a sweet (if largely absentee) dad. Keoghan finds the goofy spirit of his character (his joyous off-key warbling of the Blur tune is one of the film’s many highlights), and even though he doesn’t have a lot of screen time, his every appearance is welcome, charming, and funny. Keoghan is so good that you somehow forgive him for being more focused on toad secretion and his pending marriage to a woman he has known for three months than he is his children. Then again, Bug’s flat is practically a den of stability compared to Bailey’s mother’s digs: a drug haven she shares with her raging boyfriend, her younger siblings, and a dog the boyfriend can’t stand.
Into Bailey’s life comes a man named “Bird” (Franz Rogowski), who is far beyond eccentric. Unlike Arnold’s previous films, the character of Bird introduces an element of fantasy that mixes surprisingly well with her trademark well-honed naturalism. There are times when Bird presents as tangible, and other moments when he is almost an apparition. Then, in a stunning move late in the film, Bird reveals himself to be something else altogether. Arnold has never merged reverie and realism before, and to accept the film as a whole, you do have to go along with the flight. Had someone described the film to me and fully revealed Bird’s character, I would have thought they were putting me on. “Andrea Arnold would never do that.” But she did, and the payoff is as winning as the move is bold.
As effectively as Rogowski sells the character, Nykiya Adams’ perfectly grounded performance allows, even demands, that the viewer accept what amounts to one hell of a plot twist for a director known for nothing of the sort. Like Katie Jarvis and Sasha Lane before her, Adams does not give off the slightest signs of being “actorly” in her performance. It’s no exaggeration to say that the film does not work without her.
Nature has always played a significant role in Arnold’s films. Along with the winged creatures and the toads in Bird, Arnold settles her restless camera on a butterfly landing on a child’s hand and on the face of a horse standing over top of that same child as she wakes from a nap in a field. For all the grim and gritty reality in her work, there has always been an appreciation for the beauty of the natural world. With Bird, Arnold switches up her game and adds the unnatural to her tool kit. I don’t mind saying that I fell for it. Maybe I should know better, but somehow the pieces fit.
Bird will be released in theaters on November 8, 2024
