Little Wing Review - Brian Cox Utilized In An Provocative Young Drama
By georgepalmerjr - created - 1 day ago - updated - Public
Che Tafari, Brooklynn Prince and Brian Cox in Little Wing.
Photograph: Allyson Riggs/Paramount+
Little Wing Review - Brian Cox Utilized In An Provocative Young Drama
Little Wing, a debut young-adult drama film, was still three days from its March 13th premiere date, but positive buzz was already building, with early reviews calling it " Shows a refreshingly realistic side of being a modern day teen - with broken relationships and sharp honest dialogue that is ultimately relatable - to a fault. But takes an unexpected fascinating flight into a world of redemption, family, and hope..," and " Little Wing succeeds on authenticity and powerful performances.."
The work of journalist Susan Orlean has been adapted to the big screen a few times, most notably in 2002 by Charlie Kaufman for the Oscar-nominated rumination on the nature of writing itself, "Adaptation." But even the girl power surfing film "Blue Crush," also from 2002, had a unique rough and tumble charm to it. I think I can say the same for "Little Wing," the most recent film inspired by Orlean's singular journalism. While the script from John Gatins, who wrote "Flight," is mostly decent (there is some laughable dialogue peppered throughout)
The hype train was derailed on the premiere date of March 13th, however, by Marya E. Gates, a freelance film and culture writer based in Los Angeles and Chicago, who writes primarily about film reviews and had a different take: "Dean Israelite's direction is so fussy, frenetic, and disjointed that it renders moot any charm the story may have once contained."
Throughout this review, I used her excellent film review skills and her various valid criticisms peppered throughout her review of the film about how the film director & executive producer Israelite's incoherent direction lead to main characters not being fully developed to help the audience connect with the performances' of the lead actors, and the supporting actors in the cast, as a result the audience will pull themselves into the storyline and connect on a emotional level with the actor's performances as the main characters as the story unfolds.
Set in Portland, Oregon, the film stars Brooklynn Prince, channeling the look and vibe of an early Kelly Macdonald, as an angsty 13-year-old girl named Kaitlyn, who blames all her bad behavior at school on the "emotional upheaval" of parents' recent divorce. Kaitlyn lives with her detective mother Maddie (Kelly Reilly) and her brother Matt (Simon Kahn), who has mostly gone silent in the wake of his family's disintegration. Unable to afford the $100K mortgage on their house (yet somehow still affording to send her children to private school), Maddie has put the family home on the market. She also inexplicably allowed her co-worker to give Kaitlyn two young racing pigeons.
The Florida Project actor, Brooklynn Prince is one of the many most harmonious parts in this coming-of-age saga about pigeons, which are two of the best parts about the movie.
Kaitlyn is unimpressed with the birds until her best friend Adam (Che Tafari) tells her about a pigeon racing enthusiast named Jaan (Brian Cox) who has a bird named the Granger who is worth $125 grand. The two very young adults then decide to steal the bird and sell it to the Russian pigeon mafia. Then, of course, Jaan tracks them down and the whole gang decides to take on the mafia and get the bird back.
There's a lovely metaphor in the film about pigeons and home, established at the very beginning with a quote by Orlean on how racing pigeons "have a fixed, profound, and nearly incontrovertible sense of home." Kaitlyn is the pigeon, yet the reason she loves her home so much is never really established. What memories does she have there? What is it she loves so much about this house other than she's lived there her whole life? At least Matt questions her saying, "It was hard to grow up here sometimes."
Other than a love of Bikini Kill, the character of Kailtyn is never fully formed beyond generic angst, with an occasional hint at some suicidal ideation. In fact, most of the characters are blank slates. Maddie is a cop in Portland, a city that has been riddled with police direct & indirect violence against people of colour who are not white, yet that is never alluded to.
Why Adam, a very young Black male living in a so called post-racial world, would offer to commit a crime under the influence of a little White girl Kaitlyn solely to maybe get to French kiss her is wholly unbelievable, which I frankly believe is racist and promotes racism (white supremacy), as a local & global system of government which promotes the ideas of mistreatment, subjugation and domination based on skin colour.
Cox does his best to imbue some genuine pathos into the role of Jaan, in what could have been a nice companion performance to Nicolas Cage's poetic work in the far superior Portland-set beloved animal heist gone awry film "Pig," but then he's saddled with the late-film revelation that he's dying of cancer, which elicits groans rather than any added empathy.
All of this might have been shaped into something passable if it weren't for Israelite's incoherent direction. He hasn't shaken off the frenetic cartoon style that's en vogue for children's film (and which even then comes across as condescending towards young people). As Israelite attempts to blend comedy, action, and drama, Anne Nikitin's score continually shifts between three divergent musical styles with absolutely no cohesion to blend them all together. Smash edits and other unnecessarily showy techniques overpower the cast's performances. Like a lot of films today, "Little Wing" is shot in an extreme widescreen, yet Israelite and cinematographer Jeff Cutter never fill the frame with anything interesting.
At one point Kaitlyn disrupts a classroom presentation to spout the words from Kathleen Hana's Le Tigre song "Keep On Livin', repeating the lyrics "This is your time, this is your life and/You gotta keep on (Keep on livin!)" over and over. This should be a cathartic moment for the Kailtyn and the audience, yet the moment is undercut by Cutter's shoddy handheld camera and the treacly, over calibrated editing that tells the viewer how they should feel rather than just trusting Prince's performance to evoke their emotions.
Worst of all is the way the pigeons are filmed. Pigeons are beautiful birds. Their plumage can sparkle, speckled with deep purple and grey and orange and teal hues. The Granger is described as having a white helmet head, and while the bird used does indeed fit that description, he never gets a close-up. Nor do Kaitlyn's new birds, Charlie Tickets and Juliet. During the film's final pigeon race scene, thousands of poorly CGI'd birds "fly" out into the dawn, surrounding Cox as he tips his hat to them.
Cox deserves better. Prince deserves better. Tafari deserves better. Audiences deserve better. And, frankly, pigeons deserve better.
On Paramount+ now.
