Feb. 26--Amy Morton is such a fine, strong, honest stage actress, it's no wonder she has branched out successfully to being a series regular on "Chicago P.D." (though her first TV work came way back in 1983) and a fair amount of films, "Up in the Air" among them (she played George Clooney's sister). Shot three winters ago in northern Maine, the brooding independent low-budget drama "Bluebird," now in a week's run at Facets Cinematheque, reasserts Morton's formidable talent.
It draws upon the thing she has in her corner eluding many of her most talented Chicago theater colleagues: subtlety.
Her character, Lesley, is a school bus driver with a logger husband (John Slattery of "Mad Men") and a sweet, alert teenage daughter (Emily Meade). The tragedy in "Bluebird" arrives early and lingers throughout the picture. At the end of a shift, on a subzero day, Lesley locks up her bus without realizing a boy is still on board, sleeping on one of the seats near the back.
Hospitalized in a hypothermic coma and near death, the boy leaves everyone on screen in a state of similarly suspended animation. We learn of many lives and side stories here, from the boy's reckless mother (Louisa Krause) to his loving grandmother (Margo Martindale) to the bus driver's daughter, who loses her virginity with a fellow student she thought she could trust.
Lesley's capacity for internalizing her grief and guilt comes through in a scene, one of the most effective, in which she's peeling potatoes at her kitchen sink, trying to get through a simple task without falling apart. As her daughter and husband interact with Lesley, director Lance Edmands muffles the sound and brings us closer in to what's she's hiding, rather than what she's hearing at the moment. The ace cinematographer Jody Lee Lipes, shooting in widescreen 35 mm, lights "Bluebird" with a supple yet unromantic touch. And Edmands, who grew up in Maine, films the locales like a native, not a tourist.
Elements of earlier and more fully realized works can be found here, to be sure, notably Atom Egoyan's "The Sweet Hereafter" and David Gordon Green's "Snow Angels." Neither of which were what anyone would call a larky time at the movies. Aspects of Edmands' small, concise and careful film could've used fleshing-out and less of an on-the-nose approach (evident, for example, in the cross-cutting between a car accident and a logging truck mishap). But Morton and Slattery go at the material like the stage-trained, film-friendly pros they are. The dangling ending won't appeal to everyone, but nobody makes a movie like "Bluebird" with that in mind, anyway.
"Bluebird" -- 3 stars
No MPAA rating
Running time: 1:30
Plays: Friday-Thursday at Facets Cinematheque
mjphillips@tribpub.com
