Netherlands
77 minutes
5 stars out of 5
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I knew going into this that it was going to be a very raw and emotional movie. I was anticipating that, I knew what it was about, I thought I could guess how the gist of it was going to go. But making assumptions about this particular movie turned out not to be the way to go because you may know the plot, and it may seem simple- a young boy with a rocky relationship with his father adopts a jackdaw- but this is a movie that has such rich emotional range that it can't be limited to just a short summary of the concept.
This movie highlights the tendency of people who are going through trauma or who have been through trauma before to find something smaller and more fragile than them and protect it, which is something I don't often see in film. The bird needs the boy, but the boy also needs the bird- his home life is so full of hair-trigger anger at the slightest thing that he needs the bird to teach him to be gentle, he needs to be able to see the way his actions can impact this small life, and most of all he needs a friend that can interact with him and care about him more than the humans around him can. The movie does weird things to your ideas about wild birds; at the beginning of the movie I was thinking about how it really wasn't such a great idea to adopt a random jackdaw, but by the end, I didn't care one bit. It smells vaguely of Disneyfication and idealism and you still shouldn't take home a bird unless it's gravely injured and needs help, but gosh, none of that mattered by the end.
Something I'm realizing just now while typing this is that all of the anger and all of the negativity in this film comes from a place of grief. It's not an excuse or a justification, but it changes things a little when you understand that the characters in this film are only hurting others because of how much they hurt themselves. There is a lot of that hurt in this, but there's also healing, the possibility of forgiveness and of fighting your way to making peace with the things that weigh heavy on your heart.
None of this could have been as beautiful as it was had it not been for some truly wonderful child acting as well as what had to have been an expertly trained bird. It feels like we're seeing all of this boy, Jojo; one hundred percent of his character and all of the things unique to him, and the understanding the film has of what it's like to be a child and to be vulnerable but brave is perfect. It gets Jojo's father's abuse so right it's hard to watch. The way he isn't violent all the time, they way he occasionally shows a little bit of love towards his son, but then he doesn't give Jojo an inch and is unwilling to show forgiveness. I guess that's another central theme of the film: Forgiveness, how hard it can be, how much it can hurt, and all the good it can do.
Movies like this are cathartic. Movies like this with an open heart that show the inner workings of a relationship and how it can go both wrong and right tap into some reserve well of emotion that needs to be drained every so often. This might not be the most realistic portrayal of animal husbandry (but really, what child has mastered animal husbandry by their tweens) but it is a realistic portrayal of a cycle of love and hate, hurt and hope.
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