The Holocaust drama “White Bird” is a sensitive, well-intentioned but ultimately quite programmatic film, presenting the tragedy primarily as a school lesson for today’s children. It’s a long flashback of a French grandmother talking to her grandson about tolerance, and is aimed primarily at the young adult audience of the source material, a graphic novel by RJ Palacio.
Directed by Marc Forster (“Finding Neverland”), the film is also a sequel of sorts (perhaps it’s more accurate to call it a “universe expander”) to 2017’s “Wonder,” Stephan Chbosky’s film about a Palacio novel about a intelligent, wise and kind-hearted boy named August “Auggie” Pullman who was born with a facial deformity, mandibulofacial dysostosis, and struggled to be accepted by his classmates. “White Bird” is an independent film, but it has a connection to “Wonder”: the object of the lesson is Julian Albans (Bryce Gheisar, the only returning cast member from the previous film), one of the boys he used to bully. . Auggie, and finally apologized to him, but only after being expelled.
“White Bird” begins with Julian at an elite prep school in Manhattan getting a belated taste of his own medicine, courtesy of a bully who tells him in the lunchroom that he is sitting at the “loser table.” He feels preemptively excluded and becomes obsessed with “fitting in” and being “normal,” which he defines as being neither “bad nor nice.” His grandmother Sara (Helen Mirren), who is in New York to attend an exhibition of her art, tells him the story that takes up most of the rest of the film, about a 1942 incident that occurred in an Alsatian region outside of the official area. Nazi occupation zone in France, but close enough to feel the progressive infiltration. The main character is fifteen-year-old Sara (Ariella Glaser), a Jewish girl whose mother and father (Olivia Ross and Ishai Golan) deny her ability to escape persecution if the Nazi presence increases, which of course it does.
The film quickly becomes a modified version of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” in which Sara is hidden in a barn by the family of a classmate named Julien Beaumier (Orlando Schwerdt). Julien walks with a brace due to polio and is mocked by some classmates, who nicknamed him The Crab because of his sideways gait. Time passes and feelings grow between them. Sara is protected and cared for by Julien’s parents (Gillian Anderson and Jo-Stone Fewings) and almost feels like she has a new family, or at least a very good, if likely, temporary replacement. The framing device guarantees that things are going to get a lot worse, and they do.
Photographed in a wide “epic” format by Matthias Koenigswieser, “White Bird” has that solid, attractive but anonymous handcrafted look that Academy voters seem to love in historical dramas. Shots of houses, streets, landscapes, and configurations of people do the work the story needs, but they rarely communicate an idea outside of their plot function. The film also has too obvious a production design to be taken seriously as a gritty, realistic story ripped from real life (all the sets look like they were freshly painted the night before the cameras rolled, and most of the clothes look new. ; Doesn’t anyone in this town get their knees dirty or a sweater caught on a nail?). Overall, it is too clean and tidy, both in the visual and narrative sense of those words, to move and surprise a viewer older than, say, 14 who has seen a movie or read another book about the Holocaust aimed at adults. , or even learned a little about that dark period of European history in a classroom.
And, frankly, there’s something finicky about the way the film takes what is, in the grand scheme of things, a nightmarish story about the immediate impact of a genocidal regime on a handful of individual lives, and boils it down to a romance. youthful with a message in the form of a bumper sticker. : As Grandmère Sara says: “You forget many things in life, but you never forget kindness.” There’s a secondary message at the end that being nice makes you more attractive and more likely to get dates. There are many counterexamples to that statement in the real world, but this is not the place to discuss them.