White Bird in a Blizzard (2014)
Directed by Gregg Araki
In 1988, a teenage girl's life is thrown into chaos when her mother disappears.
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What critics compared White Bird in a Blizzard to
GREGG ARAKI FOLLOWED his 1992 breakthrough, The Living End, one of the foundational titles of the New Queer Cinema, with what he called his “teenage apocalypse trilogy”: Totally Fucked Up (1993), The Doom Generation (1995), and Nowhere (1997).
For the last 25 years, Araki has been seemingly obsessed with the years of sexual exploration and teenage rebellion in works like “The Doom Generation,” “Nowhere” and “Kaboom.”
The film is directed by Gregg Araki, whose scintillating portrayal of disaffected youth in films like Totally F***ed Up, The Doom Generation, and Nowhere garnered him a healthy cult following in the ‘90s, even earning him the chance to write and direct a failed pilot for MTV in 2000.
Death, too, lurks in the margins, not just because Kat is plagued by dreams of a ghostly version of her mother, but because she speaks and thinks with the same emotionally deadened tone that afflicted the more psychotic creations found in Araki’s early Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy, a sequence comprising Totally F**ked Up, The Doom Generation and Nowhere.
Or more to the point, he should flick on his TV more to see his “discovery” played out infinitely grander in movies like “American Beauty” and “Little Children,” and just about every cable TV show from “The Affair” to “Mad Men.”
Based on Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical novel, “TDOATG” does have a personal feel to it, and yet: Hinging the story—which co-stars Kristen Wiig as Minnie’s mom and Christopher Meloni, not far from his role in the somewhat-similar “White Bird in a Blizzard,” as Minnie’s stepdad—on this statutory rape relationship (I don’t know if the law was different in 1976, but that’s not the point) leads the focus astray.