The Big Year (2011)

[Edgy MD]

Three ambitious birders (Steve Martin, Jack Black, Owen Wilson) compete to see who can spot the most species of bird in a single year.

It's a film, also, with a lot of birds.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Boring.

[Edgy MD]

A bird hater.

[Guest John Cougar Lunchbucket]

Birds are nice. I remember a few chuckles. But, like, nothing happened.

[Edgy MD]

Yeah, the narrative held together well, but it led on mostly pointlessly, save that this strange obsessive hobby led to increases in some people's lives, and deteriorations in others.

I imagine Steve Martin and Jack Black had a sitdown on the subject of what's left when you're no longer playing it for laughs. With Black, when he's not playing the ham, there's usually this amorality that's left over, like in King Kong, and it's in fact creepier when he's a straight guy without a broken moral compass. But (to the extent that's a good thing), he didn't even bring that to the table, and Wilson emerges as the obsessed villain figure. But seeing him as the broken guy is a tough sell also, in light of his depression-induced suicide attempt.

Clearly the studio had high hopes for this film, enlisting heavy hitters for supporting parts (Anjelica Huston, Brian Dennehy, Dianne Wiest, Kevin Pollack, and Rashida Jones), plus filming in many an exotic North American location. And I guess any fun derived in it comes in part from being daytrippers along for the ride in this strange hobby that certainly makes for a pleasant few hours diversion but takes a rare breed to make a true avocation of.

So, no, you won't get deeply engaged, but the birds are pretty, though your disengagement may leave you with a disappointing tendency to play at guessing which shots are CGI enhanced. A shot on a frigid mountainside, for instance, won't have the characters breathing vapor or red-nosed. This stuff breaks the old suspension of disbelief, even if subconsciously.

So, yeah, I agree with you, but I still retained some good will for it.

[Edgy MD]

I was thinking about this this morning as I'm staying at a place that is practically a bird sanctuary. I think what this was missing was a narrative structure that places it one of the more traditional film genres. There's this friendly but desperate rivalry at the center of it, but it never descends into the physical degradations and come-uppances of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, for instance. There's a fe romantic subplots, but all lack the narrative arc of a romantic comedy. What it most resembles is a race film (score is even kept on screen at a few junctures), but without the brilliant mid-stream re-strategizing and desperate gambits that make those films work.

What you're left with is the birds, and there's some cheating there, as the better wildlife photography is augmented by CGI, but as they cheat technically, they sort of wimp out narratively. The birds naturally become metaphors for the characters, but never at any profound or central level, And if you're not deriving a useful meaning from it, then you're doing what the more casual birders dismiss the competitive birders for being --- missing the more transcendent experience in favor of filling out a checklist.