White Bird
Real Art Ways
Hartford
October 20, 2024
THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS
At about 90 minutes into White Bird, a movie about a young Jewish girl’s struggle to survive the Nazi occupation of France, I realized that I was watching a fairy tale.
That moment, which comes in a deep, dark woods that is said to be haunted by the local citizens by and terrorized by giant, ravenous wolves, recontextualized what had up until then been a lovely yet frustrating movie.
Unbeknownst to me, White Bird is a sequel to the movie Wonder. It opens with Julian Albans (played by Bryce Gheisar) starting at a new school because of his horrible treatment of a student with a deformity in the previous film. He seems set to fall back into his old ways before his grand-mère (Helen Mirren) shares the harrowing tale of her life under Nazi occupation in the 1940s.
After Nazis show up at her school to take all the Jewish children away, young Sara Blum (played wonderfully by Ariella Glaser) is rescued by a boy named Julien (again, wonderful work from Orlando Schwerdt). He walks with the help of a crutch due to polio, and his father works in the sewers. Needless to say, the other children are not kind to him, Sara included. But he saves her life anyway. Sara spends the next several years hiding in Julien’s barn, tended to by his mother Vivienne (Gillian Anderson, whom I wish they’d given more to do).
So what frustrated me about the movie at first? It was the insistence on kindness, or the lack thereof, as a theme. Before they’re separated, Sara’s father spouts a cliche about the light inside of people, and how it’s gone out for the Nazis and their French collaborators. There are references to kindness and cruelty, but the focus on being nice begins to trivialize the terror that Glaser, Schwerdt and the rest of the cast convey so well.
It felt trite to reduce the murder of six million Jews and millions of Slavs, Romani, and others to a matter of cruelty vs. kindness. Genocide isn’t just people being mean to each other, especially the industrialized horror of the Holocaust. While there are glimpses of the systematic dehumanization of Jews that paved the way, the film largely eschews that kind of analysis to focus on the individual choices of the characters in the movie.
It’s at least an interesting premise: Do the individual decisions of people aggregate into genocide? But that question is left on the table. As a result the Holocaust is made to feel like a few bad apples doing bad things instead of the mobilization of an entire state to exterminate a group of people.
But when Sara is chased into the haunted woods by Vincent, one of the boys in her class who have taken to the Nazi cause with zeal (Jem Matthews, cruel and imposing), she is rescued by the giant wolves that the people of her village told her she should avoid. They ruthlessly dispatch Vincent before disappearing without a sound.
That’s when I realized that the movie isn’t meant to be taken literally. It’s like a morality play, set to the backdrop of one of the most immoral time periods in human history. Suddenly the emphasis on kindness made much more sense, and while still a little tacky given the awfulness of the Holocaust, I could at least see what the film was going for. That realization also leads to the one sour note of the movie. Vincent finds out about Sara because he informs on Julien, who is taken away by the Nazis with a group of patients from the local hospital. They are marched out into the woods, and during a botched escape attempt Julien is shot in the back and killed.
The decision to kill Julien flies in the face of everything that the movie is trying to say about morality. Julien is the most kind person in the entire film, and his reward is to die face down in a snowy field, while Sara is rescued by magical wolves. In fact, Julien is the only major character to die on screen in the entire movie. He doesn’t receive a hero’s death or make a grand sacrifice. The nature of his death just felt wanton. I couldn’t muster up sadness, only a profound sense of disappointment that the kindness the film pushes so hard was not rewarded.
Perhaps Julien’s death is necessary to change his namesake (grand-mère makes it clear that Julian Alban was named after her protector), as he is transformed into a kind boy after hearing his grand-mère’s tale. But it seems more that the present day Julian was affected by the overall story, not Julien’s death specifically.
Aside from that senseless death, White Bird is quite affecting as a reminder that kindness does matter, and whether or not the cruelty of individuals is the total explanation of the Holocaust, it’s certainly the start.
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White Bird continues at Real Art Ways through Oct. 24.
Jamil goes to learn about Hartford’s public artwork.
