Review by Andrew Swafford
As in many of her previous films (Fish Tank, American Honey), the handheld camera of Andrea Arnold’s Bird is often shaky and chaotic, matching the pace of someone in a dead sprint or otherwise tumbling through life. But when we first meet Bailey (Nykiya Adams), we’re looking through her iPhone camera: she takes any chance she can to film the calmer world around her, be it of butterflies crawling on her finger or birds soaring overhead. Her life does not usually feel like this. And it never does for long, as we learn when her father (a man named “Bug” covered head-to-toe in bug tattoos and played with reckless abandon by Barry Keoghan) careens into her solitude on his motorized scooter. Practically scooping his daughter onto the machine as he passes, he blasts punk music and shouts along to the lyrics as he returns Bailey to their housing project where he explains his plan to make millions by selling acid that secretes from the skin of a psychedelically gifted Colorado toad. (Though he will only later realize that the toad supposedly only slimes to “sincere music” like Coldplay’s “Yellow.”) As cute as the toad thing can be, Bug is a wildly irresponsible father, and Bailey’s life is as much thrown into chaos by him as it has been by the institutional forces that keep poor people poor everywhere.
Bird is a loud film, as Bailey often finds herself being shouted at by her father and other men who similarly demand unearned respect. The film’s soundscape buzzes with restless energy, filled as it is with lots of cross-talk and lots of music. Andrea Arnold habitually makes great use of music in her films, often letting songs play out in full and as they would sound in a particular space as her characters authentically engage with music in real time, often communally. Bird’s soundtrack is a broad patchwork of different genres, from the aforementioned punk to hip-hop to what Bailey calls “dad music” to whatever “Cotton Eye Joe” is. And the whole jagged soundscape is tied together beautifully by none other than Burial, the elusive and enigmatic UK electronic musician who is currently taking his first steps into soundtrack work with this film as well as Harmony Korine’s Baby Invasion. As a longtime admirer of Burial’s work, I love how this movie takes full advantage of the sheer breadth of his sound, which ranges from noisy club bangers to microscopic-sounding ambient textures. His beautiful OST even sees him playing with some sounds he’s never used before, like trap hi-hats in a frantic chase scene and wind-chimes / church bells for the more contemplative and reflective moments.
Although it’s a hard-edged narrative about impoverished characters living unstable lives, the heart of the film rests with Bailey and her desire to experience peace. She’s never happier than she is floating in the ocean, as she’s seen in many of the film’s marketing materials. And alone in her bedroom, paper-thin walls away from her dad’s nonsense, she plugs her phone into a mini-projector and watches her own nature videos on loop. Her camera doesn’t just serve an escapist purpose, either, but also a liberating one: when she is confronted by men she feels threatened by, she instinctively starts recording them, and at one point circulates a key video among her brother’s vigilante friends to resolve an abusive domestic situation. In this way, Bird seems profoundly concerned with filmmaking and music as not simply frivolous luxuries but as tools with practical uses, whether to bring people together or make people feel safe.