The most important thing a movie has to strive for probably is involvement. If a viewer doesn’t feel involved in what is happening to the characters, they probably won’t enjoy your film.
There are several ways to create that involvement: strong, deep characters, shocking events that grab you or by creating a believable world. Unfortunately White Bird in a Blizzard does not manage to do any of these, despite the fact that the mother of the main character suddenly vanishes.
That main character is Kat Connor (Shailene Woodley) and her mother Eve (Eva Green) was a stay at home mother who did everything perfectly and made sure her husband Brock (Christopher Meloni) did so too. That is until she disappeared. It is an event Kat hasn’t really dealt with, but as she has gotten older wants to face. During a conversation with a shrink (Angela Bassett) she tells what she can remember.
White Bird in a Blizzard is a movie which mixes dream sequences with flashbacks and current events. Partly because of the way it tells all these the story doesn’t really work and feels clinical and fabricated, not pulling you into the movie. The result for me was that I started paying attention to other details and noticed a couple. Beth (Gabourey Sidibe) and Mickey (Mark Indelicato) are Kat’s friends, but you never feel convinced they actually are. I constantly felt I was looking at three actors going through a script. There is a scene in the movie in which they decide to go out and dance and suddenly they are all wearing punk outfits, something they don’t do otherwise. It feels like the creators of the film wanted to create the feeling of it taking place in the eighties, but forgetting that you have to do it consistently and convincingly. The way it is implemented here the characters don’t feel real. Before everything unravels you already know how it will, taking away any suspense. Although Woodley and Green give good performances it isn’t enough to make White Bird in a Blizzard a feeling where you feel involved, which is a shame.
Woodley was magnificent here. But every time the movie seemed to stray away from her a bit, it got dull and quite uninteresting. Good review Nostra.
She’s good in everything, but when the rest of the movie doesn’t work that is a shame.