Kitchen Sink Charms

One of the few cinematic genres that’s survived the onslaught of corporate-mandated franchises is the coming-of-age story. Although the John Hughes era has passed, there’s universal accessibility to an exploration of the hardships and hiccups of adolescence. Although there have been a few notable “prestige” teen films in recent years, such as Lady Bird and Moonlight, many don’t stand out due to derivative structure.

One filmmaker who’d tapped into the scattershot nature of adolescent anxiety is Andrea Arnold, the British writer/director who broke out when her short film Wasp won an Academy Award. Arnold announced herself as an adventurous auteur with her punishing slice-of-life drama Fish Tank, which examined the isolation of a teenage girl who’s fallen in love with her mother’s new boyfriend. Fish Tank was a throwback to when films about teenage maturation could be unpredictable, dangerous, and truthful to a fault; her 2009 masterpiece had more in common with Rebel Without a Cause and The 400 Blows than Mean Girls or Clueless.

Although Arnold delivered another masterwork with American Honey, the last decade of her career has been dominated by anonymous work on prestige television. Networks like HBO often give burgeoning writer/directors more creative input than they’re generally awarded by film studios, but Arnold’s efforts on the second season of the star-studded melodrama Big Little Lies was equivalent to that of a hired gun. It’s much harder to work within the constraints of a program that has already decided on its look and feel, and Arnold’s contributions to the Prime Video originals Transparent and I Love Dick also lacked her more idiosyncratic sensibilities.

Arnold has found a way to return to her roots with Bird, another coming-of-age story that featured the breakout star Nykiya Adams as the 12-year-old girl Bailey, who’s grown up in the impoverished island communities of England. Arnold’s style is often conflated with the kitchen sink realism movement, which emerged in England in the 1950s as a way to emphasize working-class characters and express frustration with infrastructural inequalities. This shift towards social realism in British cinema resulted in classics like Look Back in Anger and Trainspotting, but tended to revolve around the outlook of embittered young men who show disdain for authority. Although Arnold’s work inherited many of the aesthetic qualities of this style, its social implications have been much more ambiguous. There’s a matter-of-fact nature to her work, as any cynicism about what she’s portrayed is a result of an audience’s reaction to an experience they’re reluctant to acknowledge.

Arnold’s films work best when she utilizes unknown actors whose presence wouldn’t be distracting within a slice-of-life story. Bird does feature Barry Keoghan as Bailey’s father, Bug, but his transformation into a charismatic, tattooed motorcycle driver is convincing. Keoghan’s noted for his ability to portray oddballs and outlaws in recent cult hits such as Saltburn and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, and he’s similarly effective as a man who’s unprepared for adulthood, much less fatherhood. It’s a performance that goes between blatant ignorance and sentimentality, and manages to avoid the trappings of the “troubled father” archetype.

If there’s any recurring narrative thread that connects the various anecdotes in Bird to one another, it is Bailey’s anxiety about her father’s upcoming marriage. It’s a compelling motivation for her to venture off on independent adventures, but Bailey’s lack of open disdain for the expansion of her family reflects a sense of maturity. One of the consequences of being a child of an underdeveloped parent is the acceptance of adult responsibilities at a fairly young age; Bailey’s learned to take care of her siblings in the case that her father’s misbehavior resulted in his untimely arrest, or even death. It’s another case in which Arnold exhibits her ability to identify young talent; Adams is a terrific physical performer who’s able to imply more with a subtle facial expression than an expositional passage of dialogue.

The one factor in Bird that’s relatively new territory for Arnold is the use of a highly metaphorical stand-in character named Bird, portrayed by Franz Rogowski. Bird’s a whimsical figure who could’ve been plucked out of a Charles Dickens story, and pops up whenever Bailey’s in need of a friend or confidante. The notion of a child’s emotions taking physical form is trite, but Bird is open-ended when it comes to what this character is intended to represent. There’s enough legitimate character development to assume that he’s a real person of some sort, but a hard swing towards the supernatural in the final act makes it clear that much of what’s appeared on screen has been based on Bailey’s individualistic perception of events.

It’s not a filmmaker’s job to evoke sympathy for its characters, as the push towards diversification in coming-of-age films has ironically sanded off the edges in favor of the amateur notion of “Why can’t we all get along?” Arnold’s stories speak for themselves, and Bird is compelling as a sporadic, funny, and moving exploration of life on the edge.