White Bird Review
White Bird (2023) Film Review, a movie directed by Marc Forster, written by Mark Bomback and R.J. Palacio and starring Helen Mirren, Ariella Glaser, Orlando Schwerdt, Gillian Anderson, Bryce Gheisar, Kevan Van Thompson, Ishai Golan, Olivia Ross, Selma Kaymakci, Jem Matthews, Jordan Cramond, Yelisey Kazakevich, Vladimir Javorsky and Cyril Dobry.
Director Marc Forster’s touching new drama, White Bird, builds off of 2017’s box-office hit, Wonder, but still stands on its own merits as a character-driven film that will move audiences despite its flaws. This new film stars Ariella Glaser as a teenager named Sara Blum, who is Jewish, and is hidden from the Nazis as she faces the possibility of being killed during World War II. White Bird goes through a lot of emotional scenes during its running time and some of them are extraordinarily powerful to behold. Though the film has a familiar feel during a couple of stretches throughout, the overall positive nature of the central theme shines through.
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This film opens with the character from Wonder, Julian Albans (Bryce Gheisar), who is a former bully of sorts in a new school where a local girl tries to give him a warm welcome by discussing a club she participates in. However, a fellow student tells Julian he is sitting in the losers’ area of the cafeteria. We meet Julian’s grandmother from Paris, Sara (now played by Helen Mirren), whose younger self is the focus of the flashbacks the movie displays. Sara is having her artwork featured in an art retrospect and she tells Julian that she must be old considering that the show is called a “retrospect.” Sara begins to tell a tale about her past.
The other main character in White Bird is Julien Beaumier (Orlando Schwerdt), a good-hearted but polio-stricken student who walks with a brace. Julien feels he connects a bit with Sara, but the movie really focuses on what happens when the Nazis show up at their school, looking to kill the Jewish students. The faculty send the Jewish kids on their way in an effort to save them but after devastating circumstances unfold, Sara is hidden by Julien in a barn by his house. Julien’s mother, Vivienne, is played by the great Gillian Anderson.
Sara and Julien form a compelling bond between them as Julien teaches her about things he learns in school. It is an emotional relationship at the core of White Bird. The “white bird” of the movie’s title is a motif used in the film to represent hope, and the bird appears on paper in drawings and flying in the sky as well.
White Bird uses a lot of themes that can feel a bit over-simplified to tell the story the film aims to share. However, despite this fact, the film is very heartfelt thanks to truly sincere performances by Glaser and Schwerdt who play off each other with precision that brings their characters to life in an appealing way.
The dark themes of the film are also mostly portrayed accurately. There are some frightening realities of the time period on display here, though, that sometimes must be streamlined in order to fit the type of inspirational drama that White Bird is at its very center. The movie’s central message is hope and it centers on the need for people to care for one another during difficult times. Kindness can come back to people fourfold more successfully than feelings of hatred or other emotions. It’s a simple message but, with Helen Mirren as the one spelling it out, it comes across as even more powerful a message.
Mirren’s performance is basically a device that is used to frame the story, and the actress acquits herself admirably in her showy role, making the most of all her limited screen time. Bryce Gheisar is also solid in his part as well as the one who is learning the message of the story and setting out to implement it by film’s end. Gillian Anderson is predictably perfect in her scenes, adding her signature expertise to her own role.
The film rests on the performances by its leads, Ariella Glaser and Orlando Schwedt, though. They create the necessary emotions that the story needs to be told successfully and both performers are up to the task to lead a film which is obviously going to take the audience to tear-jerking results all around. Director Forster never manipulates the audiences into tears. The emotions and tears the audience will conjure up are fully earned in the end.
White Bird is an overall assured, dramatic success. It’s all the more effective due to its lofty ambitions even if some of them are not fully realized due to the movie’s necessity to essentially work as a crowd-pleaser. There are some much darker aspects of the story which aren’t fully explored but still. This film is the type of truly moving picture we need more of and if it occasionally feels a bit conventional then perhaps it is in certain respects. Old school dramas like this one are more than welcome in a movie-going climate that is generally filled with sequels and remakes. White Bird warms the heart as it teaches important lessons on embracing life’s possibilities even under difficult circumstances.
Rating: 7/10
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