Tired of movies based on YA tearjerkers and dystopian potboilers? Refreshingly, Laura Kasischke writes novels for grownups. As for Gregg Araki, he often makes films about teenagers that only adults are old enough to watch. It might seem like an unlikely combination of sensibilities, but it mostly works in Araki’s adaptation of “White Bird in a Blizzard.”
It is the late 1980s, but Eve Connor acts like she just walked out of a Douglas Sirk movie. Rather than dying on the inside, the ostensibly perfect homemaker makes her family miserable, particularly her husband, Brock.
Their daughter Kat tries to stay out of the fray, preferring to hang with her hipster outcast friends and hook up with Phil, her pseudo-boyfriend, who lives across the street. Yet, she still notices her mother’s increasingly erratic behavior in the days leading up to her mysterious disappearance.
Told in retrospect, sort of like a sexually charged, had-I-only-known Mary Roberts Rinehart novel, “White Bird” examines the ways Kat Connor deals with her mother’s absence—a process that definitely includes resentment and denial. Still, certain opportunities come with mystery, such as her semi-regular trysts with the investigating officer, Det. Scieziesciez.
He has his own Nancy Grace-like theories regarding Kat’s mother’s fate, but she does not want to hear them. Yet, when she returns from her first semester of college, Kat suddenly starts to crave some closure.
