Blackbird is an American remake of a Danish film, Silent Heart, about a family that spends one last Christmas in spirit weekend with each other before the matriarch dies. Eventually each breaks under the emotional strain until the denouement is a crescendo of (soap) operatic levels of dramatic accusations and revelations. If you want to watch a cast of renown actors dressed impeccably in a gorgeous setting awkwardly pretend as if they have known each other for more than a few minutes and believe that depicting a realistic family means creating a polarizing experience of thinly veiled hostility and revulsion to group tears and hugs all, then you should definitely rush to see this film.
I was drawn to Blackbird because of the cast. I love watching Susan Sarandon in spite of her tendency to insulting political hyperbole that time has clearly proven her wrong (though time was not necessary), but her casting as the matriarch gives the movie an unintended whiff of Stepmom the Sequel. I love Sam Neill as an actor and a human being. I secretly wondered if the movie was briefly shot on his property because he actually raises chickens and grows food so….. Kate Winslet is a great actor, but she was the sign that maybe this movie was not going to be so great because many a crap movie has wrapped itself in the acting excellence of her reputation only for me to discover that she is such a good actor, she briefly fooled me into thinking that I was going to watch a good movie. Mia Wasikowska is a solid character actor who was definitely capturing the attention of famous directors such as Tim Burton, David Cronenberg, Chan-wook Park and Jim Jarmusch. If her star rose in the nineties, she would have been called an indie queen, but at some point, she seemingly lost favor in the industry.
In spite of the glorious cast, a road map to success with the existence of the original movie and the original screenwriter, Blackbird managed to avoid resonating on a real, emotional level at every turn. It is as if there was an innate lack of understanding of the source material and instead of improving upon it, which was possible because the third act was not great, the filmmakers made a conscious choice to take the opposite action of everything that worked in Silent Heart. If the point was to change the focus of the film from a close family trying and failing to be supportive versus a collection of strangers who dramatically get to know each other in a weekend and theoretically finally become a family (I would not come back if invited), then it was a poor decision. They act like guests in the dinner party weekend from hell, not family in a childhood home.
Blackbird feels vain and superficial. While the house in Silent Heart exuded hygge, coziness, comfort and companionship, the house in Blackbird is perfect to appear in Architectural Digest, but it never feels as if people lived there or as if it was anyone’s childhood home, although with that level of perfection, it would explain why everyone is so hostile to each other because human beings would never measure up to that standard. It feels like a play because the way that everyone moves in the space feels directed and artificial. The director rarely cedes control or depicts real intimacy by giving substantial time to the actors to breathe and for the camera to linger on them to drink in the performance if they were doing more than competing for our attention in a brittle, speedy patter of dialogue delivery. It is as if a security camera recorded their performance.
Is someone dying or are we competing for cool or diss points? The film is clearly in love with Sarandon. It is similar to some Barbra Streisand movies when you wait for the ugly duckling protagonist to transform into Streisand. Unlike Silent Heart, Blackbird really belabors the sickness’ accoutrements so when she becomes sensuous Sarandon, we can oooooohhh and ahhhhh appreciatively. She has to be the coolest person in the room-the irreverent, older woman, and it kind of robs the movie of oxygen. Naturally she has an edgy best friend whom she briefly had a tryst with in their early days, but the film tries too hard to pretend like it is cool with the lesbians without actually giving the lesbian character anything substantive to do, which is the cardinal sin of the film. In an innovative, but ultimately wasted bit of gender and sexual orientation bending, the younger daughter’s significant other is a girlfriend. In the original movie, that character had the most riveting interactions as the stranger in the circle. Instead that character’s best moments are stripped for parts and distributed to the more famous actors thus diminishing the role to token status and kept on the edges of the action. I was genuinely excited that Bex Taylor-Klaus was going to play someone other than a teen who learns to survive on the street, but instead they get a forgettable, downsized role. It was more frustrating in this film because it wanted sexual equality points, but like the first film, ran screaming away from the more instinctual explanation for the fireworks of the denouement.
Unlike Silent Heart, Blackbird is unsympathetic to the daughters. It clearly hates the older daughter and practically screams, “Uptight bitch just needs to get laid.” Initially it depicts the younger daughter as a typical flighty, irresponsible young person before it changes lanes whereas her Danish counterpart was a person, not a trope. While it makes an explicit effort to address mental disabilities and improve on some of the missteps of its predecessor, it feels more like a webinar. The most powerful moment in Silent Heart was how the matriarch always had faith in her daughter’s strength because of her struggle with mental illness whereas in this film, there is a coming out of the closet moment as if the mother had no idea, which I guess is possible, but felt tonally off. Hi mom, I am bipolar. Nice to meet you, bipolar daughter. Let us cuddle in bed while facing the camera…oh wait, no, let’s look at each other in a perfect bed under a perfect photo with a grey and white color scheme from the linen to our pajamas. Where is the oxygen machine now? Would ruin the shot.
Instead Blackbird expands the roles of the grandson and the son in law with mixed results. No offense to Anson Boon, who plays the grandson, but did he kill Lucas Hedges to get that job, or was Hedges too good for this movie (Ben Is Back is worse). Boon looks too damn old to me to convincingly play a teenager. It isn’t working for me, my dude. So dreadful. The Office’s Rainn Wilson does some nice work here in spite of how the filmmakers decide to change the role of the spouse into the uncool, butt of the joke in the family. He does some nice work with his hands. He is always silently reaching out to people either to attempt to quiet their harshness, reassure someone or to bring them closer. He makes the most of a thankless role, seems to understand the story the best and inhabit the character rather than play it in a way that his dramatic superiors never do.
Blackbird is a small movie that if I actually lived in it, I would not feel safe around these people. They pat themselves on the back and are clearly successful, but they are not kind. They are well-intentioned, cultivated creations who do not have any understanding of others because they do not know themselves. They think that they are good because of their beliefs, but their beliefs are not reflected in their actions, which betray a constant annoyance, impatience and narcissistic revulsion of anyone not like them instead of a true appreciation of difference.
