- Shailene Woodley (right) with Gabourey Sidibe and Mark Indelicato in White Bird in a Blizzard
In The Spectacular Now and The Fault in Our Stars, Shailene Woodley plays kind, idealistic, but hardly naive young women who find actualization through romantic love. One of the more compelling things about Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard—which is now available to rent at Redbox stands after it failed to get a theatrical run here last fall—is how it plays with and against Woodley’s screen persona from those other films. Spectacular and Fault used Woodley to present an idealized version of middle-class, suburban adolescence. Her characters were literate, sensitive, self-aware, and ready to grow up. Her character in White Bird is none of these things, yet Araki exploits Woodley’s inherent sympathy so well that you might not realize it at first. The gradual revelation of the character’s awfulness is but one trick White Bird has up its sleeve.
Araki claims to have taken inspiration for the film’s production design from Douglas Sirk’s suburban melodramas of the 1950s. Though the hyperbolic sets look more like a fusion of David Lynch and John Waters, one can understand what Araki means. Sirk directed Bertolt Brecht plays when he worked in German theater, and in some of his movies the mise-en-scene serves to comment (in Brechtian fashion) on how the characters relate to the society they inhabit. The suburban settings of White Bird seem practically buried under materialist excess—not unlike Kat’s mother, who’s often shown in flashbacks slaving miserably over her housework. Ultimately the movie’s all about keeping up with appearances. Kat comes to worry less about whether she’s grieving for her mother’s loss properly than whether she seems like she’s grieving properly.
