Sean, “The Movie Guy”: “Better late than never” for “White Bird” – Orange Leader

“White Bird: A Miracle Story”

Lionsgate Films

Director: Marc Forster

With Ariella Glaser, Orlando Schwerdt, Helen Mirren, Gillian Anderson, Jo Stone-Fewings and Bryce Gheisar

Rated PG-13

3 stars

The film “White Bird” was originally scheduled to hit theaters in 2022. When the film was suddenly pushed back to 2023 and then pushed back again to 2024 due to the SAG/AFTRA strike, there was resentment in the industry. If I’m honest, I assumed the delays were probably an indication that the studio was trying to bury the film because it wasn’t very good.

I readily admit that I was wrong.

“White Bird” proves to be a well-crafted and compelling young adult morality tale with several great performances that make this film easy to root for.

The film is billed as A Wonder Story and stars Helen Mirren. That’s a little misleading. The film begins with Julian (Bryce Gheisar), the bully from the movie Wonder, sitting down with his grandmother (Mirren) to hear a story from her past, but that’s just the framework. This is truly the story of Grandmother’s younger days, when she was a precocious Jewish girl named Sara living in France during the Nazi occupation.

Ariella Glaser plays the teenager Sara, who escapes the Jewish raid thanks to the help of a schoolmate (Orlando Schwerdt), who was paralyzed by polio in his youth. He agrees to hide her in his family’s barn for an entire year while Nazi youth officers constantly snoop around.

This is a story of survival in the face of the Holocaust, but also the story of young love blossoming in times of war, and perhaps most notably, a story that highlights the importance of acts of kindness in transforming a person’s life.

It’s a nice feeling for a very well made film. Director Marc Forster is an old pro at making feel-good films that appeal to mainstream audiences. This story is based on a young adult graphic novel by RJ Palacio, meaning its emotional content is presented in black and white colors. There are no ambiguous motivations in this film. That’s a bit simplistic, but also excusable in a film where Nazis are the villains.

Glaser and Schwerdt play the young teenagers excellently. They both get nice character arcs that show their development over the year while Sara was in hiding. Their romance is chaste, but quite effective as a sanitized love story. I particularly enjoyed our young character’s magical “dates,” where the two of them imagine what it would be like to drive around the world, even while hiding in an old barn. It’s very sweet.

The film takes a dark turn on the way to its end. There were several audible cries of “no” from the audience as it became clear where the story was going. It was perhaps a bit too melodramatic for my taste.

I also wish one of the Nazi youth villains wasn’t written as such an irredeemable caricature. He stopped being a flesh-and-blood being, which seemed too easy given the good performances of the rest of the cast.

Still, these points pale when compared to the acting, impressive period production design, beautiful cinematography and a score by Thomas Newman that easily stirs emotions.

I readily admit that my prejudices were wrong. White Bird: A Wonder Story is a charming family drama that should please general audiences looking for something wholesome amid all the scary/gory horror films hitting theaters in October.

Movie reviews from Sean, The Movie Guy, are published weekly in The Port Arthur News. Sean welcomes your comments via email [email protected] You can get more of Sean’s reviews by subscribing to the 2 Movie Guys podcast.