The Holocaust drama "White Bird" is a sensitive, well-meaning but ultimately rather programmatic film, presenting the tragedy mainly as a school lesson for present-day kids. It's a long flashback by a French grandmother talking to her grandson about tolerance, and it's mainly aimed at the young adult audience for the source material, a graphic novel by R.J. Palacio.
Directed by Marc Forster ("Finding Neverland"), the movie is also also a sequel of sorts—perhaps it's more accurate to call it a "universe expander"—to 2017 "Wonder," Stephan Chbosky's film of a Palacio novel about a smart, kindhearted, wise boy named August "Auggie" Pullman who was born with a facial deformity, mandibulofacial dysostosis, and struggled to be accepted by classmates. "White Bird" stands alone as a movie but does have a connection to "Wonder": the object of the lesson is Julian Albans (Bryce Gheisar, the only returning cast member fro the earlier film), one of the boys who used to bully Auggie, and ultimately apologized to him, but only after being expelled.
"White Bird" begins with Julian at an elite prep school in Manhattan getting a belated taste of his own medicine, courtesy of a bully telling him in the lunchroom that he's sitting at the "loser's table." He feels preemptively ostracized and becomes obsessed with "fitting in" and being "normal," which he defines as being neither "mean nor nice." His Grandmère Sara (Helen Mirren), who's in New York for an exhibition of her art, tells him the story that occupies most of the rest of the film's running time, about an incident from 1942 that occurred in an Alsatian region outside of the official zone of Nazi occupation in France, but close enough to feel the creeping infiltration. The main character is fifteen-year-old Sara (Ariella Glaser), a Jewish girl whose mother and father (Olivia Ross and Ishai Golan) are in denial about their ability to escape persecution if the Nazi presence escalates, which of course it does.
The movie very quickly turns into a modified version of "The Diary of Anne Frank," with Sara being hid in a barn by the family of a classmate named Julien Beaumier (Orlando Schwerdt). Julien walks with a brace due to polio and is mocked by some classmates, who've nicknamed him The Crab because of his sideways gait. Time passes and feelings grow between the two. Sara is protected and nurtured by Julien's parents (Gillian Anderson and Jo-Stone Fewings) and almost feels as if she has a new family, or at least a very good though likely temporary replacement. The framing device guarantees that things are going to get much worse, and they do.
Photographed in a wide "epic" format by Matthias Koenigswieser, "White Bird" has that rock-solid, handsome but anonymous craftsmanlike look that Academy voters seem to love in historical dramas. The shots of houses and streets and landscapes and configurations of people do the work the story needs them to do, but rarely if ever communicate an idea apart from their plot function. The movie is also a little too obviously production-designed to be taken seriously as a gritty, realistic tale torn from life (the sets all look like they were just painted the night before the cameras rolled, and most of the clothes look brand new; doesn't anybody in this town get dirt on their knees, or snag a sweater on a nail?). All in all, it's too clean and neat, in both the visual and narrative senses of those words, to move and shock a viewer over the age of, say, 14 who has seen a film or read another book about the Holocaust aimed at adults, or even learned a little bit about that grim period of European history in a classroom.
And frankly there's something squicky about the way the film takes what is, in the greater scheme, a nightmarish story about the immediate impact of a genocidal regime on a handful of individual lives, and reduces it to a youth romance with a bumper-sticker message: as Grandmère Sara puts it, "You forget many things in life, but you never forget kindness." There's a secondary message at the end that being kind makes you more attractive and more likely to get dates. There are a lot of real-world counter-examples to that assertion, but this is not the place to get into them.
