Apple cider vinegar Is Pilates for you? 'Ambient gaslighting' 'Main character energy'
MOVIES
Shailene Woodley

Shailene Woodley's 'White Bird' fails to soar

Claudia Puig
USA TODAY

White Bird in a Blizzard is blank, pale and flat when it needs to be probing and suspenseful.

A hybrid that spans an erotic coming-of-age story, missing person mystery and melancholy saga of grief, it seems more caught up in a static aesthetic than telling a compelling story. (** out of four; rated R; opening Friday in select cities.)

After hitting all the right notes in nearly every other movie over the past few years, Shailene Woodley has chosen material that doesn't seem well suited to her talents. Her naturalistic style of acting works only intermittently here.

Woodley's character is all dark hair, short skirts and heavily made-up rolling eyes, with little emotional substance.

Woodley plays a character that her volatile mother Eve (Eva Green) nicknamed Kat (short for Katrina) because "she always wanted a pet."

Green's role is almost cartoonish in its over-the-top-shrillness. Kat's dad is equally one-dimensional as Eve's polar opposite — the meekly acquiescent Brock (Christopher Meloni).

The focus is on Kat, whose most salient characteristic is a teenage sexual voracity. She is blossoming as a woman, which creates bizarre jealousy on her unhinged mother's part.

Then, her mother vanishes.

An intermittent voice-over narration does little to illuminate what's going on in Kat's head.

"I was 17 when my mother disappeared," she tells the audience as the movie opens. "Just as I was becoming nothing but my body — flesh and blood and raging hormones — she stepped out of hers and left it behind."

In flashbacks, Eve comes across like a character in a 1950s Douglas Sirk melodrama, full of suburban ennui, boozy malaise and frustrated yearnings.

Contemptuous of her husband, she flirts openly with Kat's boyfriend Phil (Shiloh Fernandez).

Director Greg Araki's goal was ostensibly to offer a harsh assessment of middle-class mores in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But what emerges in his adaptation of Laura Kasischke's 1999 novel is only occasionally intriguing and sometimes stultifying. A couple of big reveals feel surprisingly obvious.

When it comes to skewering suburbia, movies like 1997's The Ice Storm did it far more effectively.

Even the sex scenes are turgidly paced. Casting the down-to-earth Woodley as a mysterious teen nymph seems off-base. She casually seduces Detective Sciezieciez (Thomas Jane), the police officer investigating her mother's disappearance. It's easy to see why Woodley would be drawn to something out of her usual wheelhouse. But her character remains unconvincing.

Sometimes, the dialogue works; other times, it thuds.

Phil is a hunky boy next door whose malapropisms are faintly humorous. He talks about something being "a vicious circus" and asserts "I need to cut him some slacks."

Kat finds his simplicity endearing. In one of the film's better lines of dialogue, she tells her two close pals: "That's what I kind of like about him. He's just simple. You scratch the surface and there's just more surface."

Scenes of Kat with her sassy friends Beth (Gabourey Sidibe) and Mickey (Mark Indelicato) are among the most authentic-seeming.

Kat's ineffectual therapy sessions with Dr. Thaler (Angela Bassett in a wasted role) initially seem promising, then grow tiresome. It's during these meetings that she explains the recurring dreams she has of her mother in a blizzard. But her therapist dismisses the significance of those dreams as merely a way to process the blow she's been dealt.

The snowy dreams are visually striking, however, especially amid the rest of the film's murky visuals. And they may also provide clues.

Woven into Kat's story is her half-hearted attempt to unravel the mystery of her mother's disappearance. But the overall effort lacks a sense of drama.

Through it all, familiar suburban dysfunction, half-hearted sexual exploration and a bland mystery make for insipid bedfellows.

Featured Weekly Ad