Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

Movies

Predictable ‘White Bird’ seems to be killing time at Sundance

PARK CITY — Gregg Araki’s “White Bird in a Blizzard” stars one of today’s hottest young actresses (Shailene Woodley of the upcoming “Divergent”) but gets stuck in a snowdrift of Sundance cliches.

The film, based on a popular novel, is a blunderingly obvious mystery story disguised as a coming-of-age tale about a smart, sophisticated sexually precocious high schooler, Kat (Woodley, who does several unexpected nude scenes) whose nutty mother (Eva Green) disappears one day.

In the early going, the film alternates between scenes of Kat, who isn’t terribly troubled by her mother’s sudden exit, wisecracking with friends (including an amusing Gabourey Sidibe of “Precious”) and flashbacks of Green, in camp mode, swilling cocktails and hitting on Kat’s sexy boyfriend.

Kat’s dreams of wandering around in the snow looking for Mom provide a heavy-handed foreshadowing that will have you guessing what happened to the older woman half an hour before the big reveal, not that you’ll much care.

Overplayed by Green, the mother is such a stereotypical boozy desperate-housewife type that she’s no great loss, and the way Kat more or less shrugs off her disappearance is a fatal flaw. The film lacks an emotional core and sidesteps potentially dramatic situations, such as Kat’s sudden affair with a much older detective (Thomas Jane) who is working on the case.

As clues slowly trickle in, and Kat goes off to college, moves on to a third boyfriend and banters with her besties, the characters seem to be simply killing time until the completely predictable twist kicks in.

It would be a mistake to say I’d lost interest by then, because I never found any of these thinly imagined figures interesting in the first place.