Gregg Araki’s 2004 film, Mysterious Skin, was a masterpiece of the long-term emotional wreckage caused by childhood trauma. Because Araki didn’t want to traumatize the child actors, he co-opted a dream aesthetic to convey sexual abuse through metaphor without losing the impact of the actions.
Araki’s latest film, White Bird in a Blizzard, liberally borrows its tone from Mysterious Skin in order to convey the emotional trauma of having an abusive childhood marred by the disappearance of a parent.
Kat Connors (Shailene Woodley) remembers that her mother disappeared without a trace in 1988, when she was 17. Her memories cast her mother (Eva Green) and father (Chris Meloni) in a sexless marriage where her mother was a sexually needy depressed woman who saw Kat as competition, while her father was just a passive wet blanket with a bad moustache. Just before her mother disappeared, Kat had started to date and have sex with Phil, her hunky next door neighbor (Shiloh Fernandez).
White Bird in a Blizzard is half a mystery and half an exercise in memory. Araki uses Kat’s voice-over narration to cast the entire movie as a memory, and Kat herself is an unreliable narrator. She remembers events in certain lights, she remembers misremembering events, and she remembers how dreams cast other events in different lights. The way Kat weaves the tale, she’s confident enough to pull the audience along, even as we see the problems with the narrative.
The conclusion of the film isn’t surprising. Araki drops hints in the first 5 minutes that should tell you what happened. By the time Kat’s self-delusion unravels in the final 10 minutes, all of the hints have added up to the obvious finale while all of the red herrings from the self-delusion can’t help but make you a little angry at the misdirection.
If the mystery is half-assed, the themes around remember growing up aren’t. At one point, Kat and her friends are hanging out in a goth club, bitching about how terrible the club is and how its the same people listening to the same music all the time. The artifice of the statements are exactly how one might remember being overly jaded as a teenager. Similarly, nonchalantly announcing that you seduced the detective (Thomas Jane) investigating your mother’s disappearance in the middle of a record store feels like the brazen “how dumb was I?” type of recalling we all have about our youth.
The main theme of White Bird in a Blizzard is self-deception, and that theme extends to every character in the movie. Kat has to convince herself that she is now attractive, and that her family was happy. She has to convince herself of circumstances regarding the disappearance. Her parents deceive themselves that their family situation is the best. Her mother deceives herself that she’s still young, zesty, and attractive. The detective deceives himself to keep himself from going crazy after seeing things in battle (he’s an ex-marine) and as a cop. Much in the vein of The Virgin Suicides, the retro setting becomes about examining the follies of youth, and how we all lied to each other over what was actually happening in the community.
If White Bird in a Blizzard feels lacking, it’s only because Araki has dug so much deeper with Mysterious Skin. Kat isn’t willing to dig deep, so the movie can’t dig deep. White Bird requires more participation on the part of the audience to reconstruct reality from the pieces we’re given. The predictability of the finale only adds to the disappointment, but, in turn, becomes deeper while thinking of it. It’s one of the first times where, while thinking about the movie, I started laughing 20 minutes after the movie is over, miles away from the movie theater. In turn, this is a fitting reaction to a movie about memory.
Is it required viewing? No. But, I would still tell people to watch. It’s a lesser movie filled with moments of greatness that only become great after the fact, including the usually amazing Araki soundtrack filled with Araki staples.