The Trailer:
Director: Elgin James
Cast: Juno Temple, Kay Panabaker, Kyle Gallner, Carlos Penavega, & Chris Coy
Synopsis: Lily (Juno Temple) and Alison (Kay Panabaker), two friends from the Salton Sea, follow a group of boys to Los Angeles where a rift forms in their friendship and their lives are forever changed.
I really wanted to like this movie more, but there's just too much missing from it. Don't get me wrong, the story is interesting and harrowing because of it's parallels to reality, but it just didn't hit me in the way that I thought it was going to. I wanted more from it, and was given little.
So we have two friends. Lily and Alison, who are friends only by circumstance. If you know anything of the Salton Sea, you know that it's basically a wasteland. And this being the city in which our protagonists reside, isolated from the rest of the world, they are all they've got. But even still we see how Lily and Alison vary in character. Lily is emotionally unstable, with a less-than-perfect family, and she has hardened because of it. Lily is cruel, daunting, daring, naive, a follower, and terrifying. Juno Temple's portrayal of Lily is spot on, she possesses a wildness about her that fits well with Lily's whirlwind emotions and skewed perspective on life. Alison on the other hand is soft, kind, caring, cautious, smart, subtle, and loyal. Kay Panabaker is perfect for this role as she has a baby face that, as Alison, can be mistaken for gullibility but we see as the movie progresses that within her resides a quiet strength. I love the contrast between these two characters: they don't match and yet they compliment each other perfectly. It's a strange friendship. Kyle Gallner plays Jesse, the boy Lily goes to LA for. For the most part Jesse is a one-dimensional bad boy with a good heart. There's no depth to his character, even when he reveals some background about himself, it seems very cliché. Kyle Gallner does a good job, though, with the less-than-stellar character he is given. David (Chris Coy) and Louis (Carlos PenaVega) are the most one-dimensional characters I've seen in some time. They are the epitome of bad boys with charm. They make their bum lifestyle seem alluring to girls like Lily. And really that is all they do, they just reinforce their immoral, illegal lifestyles throughout the movie: every action of theirs is worst than the last. No rhyme or reason for it, they are just bad. But both actors do a fantastic job at playing apathetic, nihilistic teenagers with no vision for their lives, so I'll give them that. All in all, the acting is decent and above, there is no bad acting in Little Birds.
The story. I like how the movie starts with Lily and Alison only having each other to depend on, but that friendship quickly dissipates as Lily begins to choose the boys over Alison. Lily begins to take part in the boys' taunting of Alison's goody-two-shoe nature. We begin to witness a transition from emotionally unstable, slightly cruel girl into a monster with little regard for others and who basks in the immorality of the boys criminal lifestyle. We see how easily it is to be drawn into a world of corruption, to allow our peers to pressure us into doing horrible things in the name of fun or their survival in a cruel world. And while I like this type of message in a film, here in Little Birds it begins to feel a bit like an after-school special: "Don't fall into peer pressure or this may happen to you". And the one dimensionality and clichéd nature of the characters only reinforce that after-school special feel. Towards the end of the film everything that happens begins to feel forced and too ridiculous that the whole movie begins to lose its authenticity. I began to question why Alison stays loyal to Lily, even when Lily starts to treat her horribly and allows for the boys to be cruel to her. And then the big climax is too serendipitous and the ending is too "ahh and then they were cleansed of the horrors that they witnessed". I didn't enjoy it. Little Birds fails because of it's lack of character development. I mean, I get why the writer's did it in this way as they wanted to demonstrate how this can happen to anyone not just these girls with their specific circumstances, but it didn't allow for anything to be genuine. All of the dialogue between Lily and Alison, the transitions that both characters experience, their pain and anger, all of it's emotional potential is lost because of the lack of depth to the characters. There is so much potential here in this movie, but it's never put into motion.
Overall, Little Birds starts off well, introducing us to two interesting characters, but goes no where. All the events of the movie happen too fast and without explanation. There are characters that serve no purpose like Lily's mother played by Leslie Mann and Lily's aunt played by Kate Bosworth. I feel if they had focused on Lily's home life, the movie could have been great but as it is now it is only decent. And while it does exhibit a harrowing parallel to how teenagers are today—careless, apathetic, no respect for life and getting worse and worse with every decade— it just didn't do it for me, I haven't recommended it to anyone, nor do I plan to. Would I watch it again? No, plain and simple.
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