Year of the Cage Week Five: Birdy

Film: Birdy

Demeanor: A roughly 50/50 split between youthful cockiness and unhinged histrionics.

Hair Quality: A roughly 50/50 split between the 1960s equivalent of a Flock of Seagulls cut, and a giant bandage covering the bulk of his head.

Performance Quality: Eight Cages out of Ten.

Imagine, if you will, a scarred, depressed, borderline apoplectic Nicolas Cage lying on the floor of a small hospital room, surrounded by filthy, ancient baseballs. In his arms, he clutches at his skinny, barely cognizant best friend, who believes himself to be a bird. That's not a euphemism for something: he literally thinks he's a canary. Cage clutches at his bony, unmoving body, alternating between a soft, sobbing tone and cursing with the uncontrolled inflection of a Tourette's patient. As he writhes on the floor, clutching ever tighter to his friend (to a point that seems damn near suffocation), swearing and sobbing and cursing the world he and his friend never had the chance to be a part of, I want you to take note of this moment and pay very special attention to it.

See? It's exactly like I described. How could I possibly make this up?

This is it. This is the moment when Nicolas Cage is truly born.

The brief flashes we saw of the Cage we all knew would come in previous films like Valley Girl and The Cotton Club were little more than the initial signs of life. Like a baby bird taking its sweet time cracking through the shell, each moment in those previous films was like one more piece of the shell cracking off, revealing a bit more of the still not fully formed creature inside, the one that would go on to famously lose his shit so many times in the world of film, that he earned his own YouTube montage of him doing specifically just that. By the time Cage sits limply on that floor, head wrapped in a cumbersome bandage while screaming for his friend to not think he's a bird anymore, the shell is gone. All that's left is the gooey, shrieking mess of a career that's finally been born.

Okay, so the bird metaphor is maybe a little bit on-the-nose, but after sitting through two hours of Alan Parker's bird-man-as-metaphor-for-lost-youth movie Birdy, it's difficult to think outside the terms of birds-as-everything, because Jesus Christ birds are everything in this movie.

Based on the debut novel by William Wharton, Birdy is a time-leaping tale of two unlikely best friends forever changed by the horrors of war. As kids, Al Columbato (Cage) and the titular Birdy (Matthew Modine) have no discernible reason to like each other. Columbato is a blow-hard, cocky as hell teen who likes playing baseball with the local kids, gets into random tussles, and has something that at least resembles luck with the ladies. Birdy, on the other hand, couldn't care less about any of the above. He's a skinny, awkward kid, who spends an exorbitant amount of time studying birds. He loves them dearly, far more so than any human interactions. He studies their movements, their social behaviors, and even picks up a couple of canaries he plans to mate--with each other, of course.

And yet, after a brief, sitcom-ish misunderstanding, the two are fast friends, with Al suddenly more than happy to indulge Birdy's various whims, including training and housing carrier pigeons for fun and probably not profit. Their friendship goes through its ups and downs, but they remain loyal to each other, no matter how off-the-wall Birdy's interests get. Even when Birdy makes suits out of discarded pigeon feathers and demands they climb to the top of a nearby industrial plant to commune with the pigeons that have nested there, Al begrudgingly agrees to come along. If that's not the definition of loyalty, I don't know what is.

It's a real shame his hair never went pro.

Alas, all such friendships are typically doomed by some circumstance or another in these types of films. In this case, it's the grim, looming specter of the Vietnam War. The film opens with Birdy huddled in a tiny room inside a military mental ward. He's often naked, and clenched up into various unnatural positions that don't actually resemble a bird but are probably close enough for what audiences in 1984 were after. Al, having just recently returned from the war himself (due in no small part to a facial disfigurement earned in combat), has been sent to the hospital to try and awaken some semblance of humanity in his friend, who refuses to speak, eat, or do anything that isn't vaguely birdlike.

Columbato's method of trying to reach his friend is mostly to plead with and shout at him a lot. It's a tactic we see in many Cage films to come--Cage's sunken face belting out sorrowful moans and random bursts of anger--but chronologically speaking, Birdy is the world's first real taste of it. As Columbato, Cage is tasked with exuding both youthful brazenness and the world-weary pathos of a disfigured war veteran. His response to this challenging bit of duality is to dial up the histrionics of either version of his character to the hilt. As young Al, Cage is like the walking personification of an unearned smirk, pushing an overconfident demeanor to mask his insecurities regarding his abusing, garbage truck driving father. As older Al, Cage is so utterly destroyed by his disfigurement that he seemingly can't keep a grip on a singular emotion for more than a few seconds without suddenly veering wildly into opposite territory.

It's the early goings of the acting style Nicolas Cage affectionately refers to as "Noveau Shamanic." What does that even mean? Truthfully, nobody really knows. Cage has scarcely explained what the crux of the style is, but he definitely claims to have invented it. In watching his performance in Birdy, that claim seems to prove itself true--I can safely say that I'd never seen a performance quite like Cage's in any film dating prior to the early '80s.

And yet, for all his Cage-ian weirdness, Cage's performance is far from the most peculiar aspect of Birdy. Then again, considering the book on which it's based delves deeply into the psychological underpinnings of a boy who wishes to commune sexually with birds, I suppose that is perhaps more obvious than not.

Modine's performance is largely physical, while Cage's leans heavily on the vocal.

The avian sexy times are perhaps a bit dialed down in Parker's film (I haven't read the book, just going off what people tell me), but Birdy is no less bizarre for it. Birdy exists in a very strange space that only a handful of mid-'80s film truly occupied, a space where the stark, modernist aesthetics of the era's filmmaking completely took over whatever story the movie may have been trying to tell. Other movies that exist within this space include such Michael Mann classics as Manhunter and The Keep, and Michael Radford's severe, synth-heavy adaptation of George Orwell's 1984.

In fact, a surprising amount of Birdy reminded me of 1984. No, Birdy is not a dissection of the human condition and its willingness to submit to powers beyond its control, no matter how mad those powers might be, but there are perhaps some character similarities to Al, Birdy, and 1984 protagonist Winston Smith. All three are men born into wars they never had any say in. Smith's upbringing in a totalitarian regime fashioned him into a subservient tragedy of a man, while Al and Birdy's coming of age coinciding with the Vietnam draft ultimately robbed them of the chance to become the individuals they once believed they would become.

Beyond that, however, the links between the two films are largely aesthetic. Large portions take place inside sterile, cramped rooms in buildings that barely seem to be keeping up. Both feature experimental, synthetic scores that drone ceaselessly through every dramatic moment (the soundtrack was produced by Peter Gabriel, who remixed a few of his own songs for the score), and both films are immediately recognized for their sharp, angular camera work. In Birdy's case, that shooting style gives even the scenes in pre-war suburbia a startlingly stark, modernistic look.

Perhaps the single most obvious/egregious example of this is how Birdy, while in the hospital, always looks up through his room's single window. The camera takes the same sharp angle up at the window that Birdy's neck takes, giving the window an imposing, distant feel. Through that window, Birdy sees everything from stock footage of clouds and sky that look painfully greenscreened into the space, and even big, bright bursts of foggy moonlight that look like something out of a Hall & Oates music video. Let it forever be decreed that the 1980s were the decade of impossibly lit, overly angular windows in film.

That music video feel probably comes in no small part from Parker having most recently come off of directing Pink Floyd's The Wall. From these bizarre window shots, to long, swooping shots of Birdy's "bird's eye view" dream sequences, in which he flies through the many scenes and locales of his past life, Birdy takes on an experimental quality that perhaps a movie about a boy who thinks he's a bird had no choice but to take. If Birdy were treated with the kind of sappy sentimentality employed by so many other coming-of-age tales of the era, it probably would have been laughed out of theaters. Treated as a piece of experimental, new-age cinema, however, Birdy was celebrated by critics as a work of art.

This feature is about Nicolas Cage, but I'd be robbing you if I didn't feature at least one tasteful, artistic shot of Matthew Modine's naked form.

So instead of bird boy being a pile of "mentally challenged character" cliches, we are treated to healthy doses of Matthew Modine's naked ass as he lays in the fetal position, letting his canaries fly and flutter around him, or when he perches atop the frame of his own bed, like a bird staring at the outside world it cannot access. Modine, for his part, is quite good in the role. It's one of those largely physical performances that doesn't require much acting, so much as an ability to maintain a single state of being for elongated periods. Think early Christian Bale, if you need a contemporary comparison.

But while Modine is doing his minimalist bird thing, Cage is acting circles around him. And I don't mean that in terms of overall quality, exactly. Nicolas Cage in Birdy is the very definition of the derisive phrase "a lot of acting," the criticism we so often assign to those who seemingly overact, or go far beyond what is necessary for a given scene. That's probably a phrase we're going to be using quite a lot through the rest of 2012 in describing the various Cage performances to come. In 1984, Cage in Birdy must have looked like an absolute lunatic. Compared with future freak-outs like Face/Off, Vampire's Kiss, The Wicker Man, and, of course, Deadfall, Cage in Birdy seems almost restrained. Quaint, even.

Still, by the time Birdy rolls around to its highly dramatic conclusion, with Cage splayed across that floor hugging his nearly catatonic best friend and hurling expletives at the world that has wronged him, there is no question that we are witnessing the birth of our Greatest Living Actor. But hey, don't take my word for it. Watch for yourself.

Stray Thoughts:

• Cage's haircuts in both Valley Girl and the flashback portions of Birdy lead me to believe they were filmed within relatively close proximity of one another. Chronology would seem to dispel that theory, but dammit, they're the same haircut!
• The only thing more cliched than one main character in a movie having an angry garbage man for a father is the other main character in the movie character having a quiet, understanding high school janitor for a father.
• Has any actor had a weirder Vietnam experience in film than Matthew Modine? He went from this bizarro art-film take on post-war mental health to the complete mind-fuck that was Full Metal Jacket just three years later.
• There is a very brief moment during one of the film's few Vietnam flashbacks of Cage, newly injured, screaming at the top of his lungs while his entire face and hands are covered with blood. I really need someone to turn that into an animated GIF for me. I don't know how to do that.
• In a pinch, this GIF will do, I suppose.

Next Week:

Peggy Sue Got Married

Recent Entries:

The Cotton Club
Racing With the Moon
Rumble Fish