Gregg Araki’s White Bird in a Blizzard is a teen-alienation movie, sexy and serious, with an intriguing dollop of Douglas Sirk, master of the “women’s dramas” of the 1950s. It has a great performance from Shailene Woodley: in a different league entirely from her contribution to that tiresome YA sniffler The Fault in Our Stars. But what it also has is an absurd ending, whose events have to be reported in a hurried flashback; unsatisfying and the tiniest bit of a cheat, as the conclusion appears to double back on a piece of narrative misdirection, and then unveil a climactic piece of melodrama. But complaining seems ungrateful, considering how few films of any sort bother about their final act.
Woodley plays Kat, a high-school student who has a tense relationship with her imperious and increasingly unbalanced mother Eve, played by Eva Green with a nostril-flaring air of incipient craziness. This is good casting, though the role Green was born for will not arrive until the Sunset Boulevard remake rolls around. Despite her beauty and intelligence, Eve is stuck in a housewifely role and her discontent in the marriage poisons her relationship with Kat; she is finally at the centre of an extraordinary mystery that is to define Kat’s entire life. The film falls to pieces at the end, but this is a watchable, well-acted drama, and Woodley gets better and better.
