Image: Magnolia Pictures
Shailene Woodley and Christopher Meloni in 'White Bird in a Blizzard'
It’s an updated reverse-role American Beauty—at least, that’s what I was led to believe for the first half-hour.
If there’s anything I remember from college American history classes, it’s the image attached to the idea of “everydayness”—white-picket-fence families taking comfort in conformity, relying on a cycle of working, eating, sleeping, saving (think Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer), and secretly suffering from a lack of substance. It’s a much-seen setting of the 50’s and 90’s, and it makes for great angst-ridden movies like American Beauty, the 1999 film about a comatose Kevin Spacey awakening from this cycle, triggered by his fascination with a cheerleader. Narrating from beyond the grave (as he explains at the film’s start), he can see the dissatisfaction, nervousness, and disillusionment of his daughter and wife.
Also, they literally have white picket fence around their secretly imperfect home.
Image: Magnolia Pictures
Shailene Woodley in 'White Bird in a Blizzard'
Now imagine that American Beauty was rendered through the eyes of Spacey’s self-centered teenaged daughter. We’d probably see things only as they affected her, and the end would come as the shock it was not meant to be.
While Kat (Shailene Woodley) is almost nothing like Lester Burnam’s daughter, she does give us a familiar description of life at beginning of White Bird In A Blizzard (based on the novel by Laura Kasischke): “We’re pretending we’re this perfect little family living this perfect little life.” It’s also 1988.
What follows after the first bits should have been, by all appearances, another story of disillusionment and restlessness bred by everydayness. But whether or not you look beyond the self-absorbed main character, that’s not really what this story’s about. Kat tells us she was 17 years old when her mother disappeared. Leading up to the day she left, Eve (Eva Green) envied her daughter’s youth and beauty, flirted with Kat’s boyfriend, and began to slip into insanity “thanks to the unbearable repetition and dullness of her daily life.” Kat’s father (Christopher Meloni) served as Eve’s doormat, vulnerable and sadly stifled, and even more pronouncedly so after her disappearance. Years later, Kat is still having strange dreams about encountering her mother in a snowstorm.
But her mother’s disappearance is not what preoccupies her thoughts. Actually, it’s striking how passively Kat reacts.
Throughout the days following her mother’s disappearance, she talks half-heartedly to a shrink about her dreams, but only because dad thought it would help. Other than that, it seems as though Eve’s vanishing barely registers with her, except for when she compares the evaporation of her mother to that of her own virginity (yes, she went there). She spends much of her time trying to get her boyfriend (Shiloh Fernandez) to have sex with her again (“I miss f***ing you” she whines into the phone, and in person, “Can we please stop talking and f***?”), but he’s failed to be the right kind of sensitive after the event. Unsatisfied with his lack of attention, she decides to seduce the detective in charge of looking for her mother, claiming to her pair of hopelessly hip friends that he’s (anatomically) the kind of man she needs.
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