Birdy

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🎙️ EPISODE 365: 08.27.21 Starting in 2020, I decided to watch & review the entire Nicolas Cage filmography in alphabetical order. This is 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 – Chapter 11. At the risk of coming across like an absolute goofy loser, I'd like to confess that on some level, 1984's Birdy was a major influence on Young Jeff the Burgeoning Cinephile. I can recall seeing this on some Afternoon Movie, maybe on Channel 11 WPIX out of NYC as a ten or eleven-year old. And I can specifically recall being STRUCK by it. "Wow, this is NOT like all the other, mostly stupid movies I usually watch!" my young (dumb) self said to no-one in particular. "This is DEEP! Why is Nicolas Cage wearing that mask, perhaps it's a stand -n for the masks we all wear..." And after rewatching it for the first time in at least 20-25 years, I can say that – while it's not outwardly terrible – I definitely hadn't honed my cinematic taste buds as a weird pre-teen in New Jersey watching this weird, fake-Vietnam Alan Parker movie when I should have been outside throwing a tennis ball to myself off the roof of our garage.

Because at the end of the day, Birdy – unsurprisingly based on a book, which I'm sure flushed out certain parts of the story in a way the movie could never do in 120 minutes – IS a weird one. The plot can be boiled down to this one sentence: Matthew Modine is a strange kid from Philadelphia who wishes he were a bird and then, when he comes home from Vietnam, he thinks that he literally is one. Much of my expectations were shattered, as I went in thinking that this one might be some kind of nuanced meditation on the horrors of war (and perhaps it does that in the book), but everything related to 'Nam takes a backseat to the numerous flashbacks of Modine and his best friend Cage as teenagers. That stuff is, in fact, the bulk of this movie. If it wasn't for some bureaucratic V.A. scenes and Cage's army outfit, there would be almost no connection. And all of that's well and good, and worth whatever you want it to be, because – ultimately – this film is defined by multiple slapstick comedy routines set to "La Bamba" as much as it is anything else...



This is such a tonal nightmare, it's actually kind of interesting. It begins with a sound-collage drenched opening crawl where bits of dialogue bleed into one another over some arty shots of dark clouds fading into Modine in full bird mode at the V.A. hospital and, yeah, I should've known what I was getting into right out the gate...


But, while this thing is certainly a flop overall, it really works in moments with two great actors each in one of the more prominent roles of their young careers. Cage and Modine play just a couple of crazy normal Philly kid best buds who definitely aren't queer for one another...


That line about Philly still holds up! What doesn't is Cage's insistence that there weren't any signs of mental illness before the war, I mean, hello?...


Cage ends up putting on the pigeon suit. You see, it's all part of a ploy for them to capture pigeons as part of their "pigeon homing scheme" which isn't quite flushed out. Is it a hobby, a business venture? Who knows. Who cares. And while that "queer" line earlier seemed like a throwaway, there are some clear homoerotic undertones. But like a lot of the other big thematic stuff it's muddled to the point of insignificance. The Billy Penn boner joke is pretty good though...


They go to a factory looking for pigeons and Birdy jumps off a building because he thinks he can fly...


For the most part, Cage is the normal horny teen who just wants to fix up cars, drive to Atlantic City and pick up chicks. But his weirdo friend Birdy keeps fucking his shit up...


Which, why are these two even friends? After all, he's just a walking, talking cock block...


Birdy just doesn't see the appeal when it comes to girls. This bit about tits is highly amusing...


This is why it's hard to fully hate on this. The moments with young Cage and Modine are genuinely entertaining even if they are threading through a paper-thin plot. The two characters almost seem to be an amalgamation of a single fucked-up individual. Other than an overly controlling mother who likes to hide baseballs that kids hit onto her lawn, there isn't much by way of an inciting incident or presnece that makes Birdy the way that he is. His dad, the school janitor, is almost impossibly nice/understanding, especially given the time/place of the setting. The real major asshole in their youth is actually Cage's father, played by outstanding character actor Sandy Baron, who gets into it big-time with Birdy when he sells the car that Birdy and Cage bought and fixed up...


That scene rules. Birdy's unearned confidence seems to fly in the face of Cage's forced bravado when it comes to girls and his utter cowardice when it comes to confronting his father. Birdy eschews being "normal" when that's the only thing Cage desires. Their attraction to one another is complicated and often comical; I don't think there's a literal interpretation/reading for them being the same character, just that they seem to embody exagerrated personality traits on every point on the chart; it almost feels like ths story of a single bi-polar man.

50 minutes in, we get our first war flashback and it's only about 30 seconds long...


This is my major beef, as previously mentioned. The entire war subplot is a complete dead-end. It's at about this time in the current-time plot-line – which involves the Army asking Cage to help figure out Birdy's now full-on catatonic bird routine – that they also begin to suspect him of having his own mental issues. Enter another great character actor, Marshall Bell...


Inconsistency is at the heart of this movie's problems. Take for example the main musical line of its film score, an impossibly cheesy piano riff let's call "Birdy's Theme" ...


Juxtapose that with the jungle drums from the pigeon factory jump earlier? Who thought that could possibly jive? Throw in the multiple instances of Benny Hill "La Bamba" and you have a film that has no idea what it wants to be.

Anyway, the movie trudges along, jumping from the past to the present. Cage claps for a guy shooting hoops in a wheelchair...


...a guy who looks Clint Howard rescues his dog from being turned into food at the dog food factory...


A lot of these anecdotal moments clearly play better in book form and I'm sure adapting a 300+ page novel is never easy. That being said, I'm not really complaining, because these extraneous scenes are often the most entertaining.

Back in the past – again, well BEFORE the damn war – Birdy's mental state is clearly deteriorating. I think it's around the time he has a CANARY WET DREAM when I was like "Oh yeah, the War did nothing to this young man's demented brain"...


(Speaking of CANARY WET DREAMS, that's an excellent band name which I am claiming ownership of in this here post. No one can name their band that now, sorry)

Back in the present, Cage is getting increasingly frustrated by Birdy's antics and more aggressive in the questioning/confronting of his friend...


It's extremely overwrought shit but Cage brings it in that classic way which Cage is very famous for and known to do, so it's not terrible. Everything's ramping up to a fever pitch culminating in the most batshit sequence of events imaginable. First, this awkward post-prom encounter...


...which flows right into Birdy getting naked in his bird enclosure and... IDK, definitely not having sex with that bird (!?) 😬 Then that segues into a legitimately cool POV "flying" shot through Philadelphia...


This was the most frustrating part. It's kind of hard to posit that war fucked this guy up when he was already willfully entering into a sexual-type relationship with a canary years before getting drafted. What am I missing here? (Maybe a lot? I'm not saying that I ain't. Perhaps there's some symbolic relevance to this bird love/infatuation that I'm missing. Maybe the bird is America?? Perhaps Modine's infatuation is a stand-in for the plight of all the countries we invade? Who the fuck cares! CANARY WET DREAMS!)

The second (and last) 'Nam flashback is more brutal and is working overtime in trying to sell this as some kind of anti-war movie. It's really neither here nor there; I mean, how are you supposed to take that seriously after the canary sex scene? The best dramatic moment in the final act is Cage getting Birdy's mom to send over all of the baseballs she hid from them as a kid and dumping them all over his hospital room...


Not sure why those baseballs are the size of grapefruits but whatever.

For all its many flaws, it does have a sincerely satisfying ending. Sticking the landing with a goof might seem like a move at the viewer's expense. But I don't see it that way. For all of the fucked up things this film tries to address, however successfully, it seems to come out seeing life as a big cosmic joke. And I appreciate that. Also, they really did play "La Bamba" one more fucking time LoL...


Alan Parker (R.I.P.) is one of those directors who made a certain type of big, sweeping, often historical dramas that seem to have gone by the wayside nowadays (he also is responsible for Pink Floyd's The Wall, which is a big ole head-scratcher for me). I have a certain soft spot for this "type" of film, even if it's 100% not what I am willfully seeking out. I think there's a reason these movies are less successful in today's landscape and why you generally see less of them. It's BoomerCore. But, in terms of my Cage Project, it was a welcome departure from the 00s schlock even if I don't care to watch it again for another 20+ years.

Oh, also, did they really get a live snake to almost kill a seagull???



THE VERDICT: 7 CAGES OUT OF 10 • CLICK HERE for all 𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔜𝔢𝔞𝔯 𝔬𝔣 ℭ𝔞𝔤𝔢 Chapters + Ongoing Rankings.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 364B - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 366A ⫸

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