'White Bird': A Holocaust movie saved by Helen Mirren - review

White Bird is a new Holocaust drama that opens in theaters around Israel on Thursday, book-ended by a framing device that features Helen Mirren, and most of it is gracefully done and quite moving.

Based on a novel by R.J. Palacio, the author of the best-selling Wonder, which is referenced at the beginning, it has moments of heavy kitsch toward the end, but by then you may be so caught up in the story, that you can forgive the lapses. 

Were the narrator who tells the story in the framing device anyone other than the incomparable Mirren, one of the greatest actresses of all time, White Bird wouldn’t have worked nearly as well as it does. 

What is White Bird about?

The movie opens with a short section showing Julian (Bryce Gheisar), Mirren’s grandson, starting at a new, fancy private school in New York. This actor played the same character in Wonder, a bully who tormented the hero because of his facial deformity. At the end of Wonder, he is being transferred to a new school, and in the opening of White Bird, we see him coming home, feeling dejected after a day at that school. The cool kids have rejected him, leading him to be mean to an earnest, uncool minority student who invites him to a political club. When he gets into his apartment, he hears a noise and is startled, not expecting anyone, since his parents are usually out at rich people’s fundraisers. As soon as he sees that the unexpected visitor is his grandmother, played by Mirren, we are as pleased to see her as he is. 

She knows the story of how he bullied the other boy and was made to switch schools, and she chides him for being “unkind.” In order to explain to him the importance of kindness, she says she’d like to tell him a story about her girlhood in France during World War II, and we settle down happily because if you can’t see Mirren on screen every moment, the next best thing is hearing her voice. 

We then move into the main part of the story, which focuses on his grandmother, Sara (Ariella Glaser) at the age of 15, when she was living in a village in the Alsatian region of France in the early 1940s, where the Nazis were in control but were not harming Jews – at first. Sara’s mother (Olivia Ross) is a teacher and her father (Ishai Golan, who is very good in a small role) is a surgeon, and she has a comfortable life. Popular at school, she hangs out with her girlfriends, has a crush on the handsomest guy in the class, and is a gifted artist. Her teacher advises her to embrace her artistic gift and not hide her true self. 

But soon, there is no hiding the fact that she is Jewish, and after antisemitic laws are passed, her father makes a plan for them to flee. Before he can put his plan into effect, the Nazis and French collaborators stage a roundup of Jews at Sara’s school. Hiding in the woods, she is approached by Julien (Orlando Schwerdt), a classmate with a limp due to polio, whose father is a workman, who brings her to see his parents (Gillian Anderson and Jo-Stone Fewings), who embrace her unquestioningly and hide her in their barn. They would have taken her into their home but are afraid that their taciturn upstairs neighbors are Nazi supporters. 

The heart of the film is the connection that forms between Sara and Julien as she realizes she was wrong to have teased him with her friends and begins to see that she was spoiled and led a privileged existence up until the Nazi takeover. Julien is considerate and bright, and they begin to fall in love, as they sit in his parents’ old car, which is parked in the barn, and imagine they are taking trips around the world. There is a white bird that flies in – hence the title – and they see it as a harbinger of better times. The young leads are very appealing and this section is lovely, although we know it can’t last. 

As White Bird moves along, I couldn’t help wishing that the movie had allowed its compelling, mostly young cast and the power of its story to carry the drama, without resorting, in the final 15 minutes or so, to speeches that are so literal they are unnecessary and annoying and a few other quasi-supernatural flourishes, almost a magic realism approach. I know this sort of storytelling has its fans, but I feel that in a Holocaust narrative, it’s more effective and more honest to stick close to the truth. However, I understand that this is meant to be a film that will attract teens and tweens, as well as their parents, and so an approach that showed the horrors in a realistic way – like in the movie,  Son of Saul – was not in the cards here. Everyone speaks English with slight accents, too, and you just have to accept that. 

Despite its flaws, it does not trivialize the Holocaust, and just barely manages to avoid being part of that mini-genre I have named “Feel-Good Holocaust Films.” There have been other Holocaust movies that have made egregious and dishonest evasions, softening the horrors in a misguided attempt to attract audiences, such as The Boy in the Striped Pajamas or La Rafle (“The Round Up”), which was also set in France. I wrote about La Rafle, in a review titled, “The Good, the Bad, and the Cute,” that, “A viewer who knew nothing of the true events of World War II would think there was a guardian angel that looked out for sweet young children.”

In White Bird, at least, it is clear that innocent people, even very cute ones, suffered terribly at the hands of the Nazis and their collaborators, and even paid with their lives. The two likable young leads and Mirren elevate this to a film that does have genuinely touching moments and I hope it will be seen by the young viewers it seems to have been made for.