PLOT: After suffering the loss of their daughter, a husband and wife struggle to figure out what life means for them going forward, with the latter having to deal with an especially obnoxious starling.
REVIEW: No one would blame you if you merely looked at the poster for The Starling and assumed it was based on a book, and that that book was exclusively meant for book clubs started by women who all bought said book at the same airport. You also wouldn’t be blamed for judging both the book and the movie adaptation by its cover as something unbearably schmaltzy and simplistic, meant only for the same members of that book club who are desperate to see if the bird looks in the movie how they pictured it in the book.
And yet, this movie is not based on a popular book once recommended by Oprah. It’s an original movie, one filmed from a script by Matt Harris that he wrote in 2005. That fact makes a whole bunch of sense because — being loaded with dramatic sequences like “Staring in a Mirror” and “Time to Wreck Things” set to every entry from “Accessible Dramatic Music Vol. 1” — the movie feels like a relic of a type of movie best left alone. As a woman overcoming a tragic event via a quirky scenario, Melissa McCarthy plays Lily, who in trying to get her life back on track after the daughter of her infant daughter and attempted suicide of her husband (Chris O’Dowd), must go head-to-head with an especially aggressive starling in her yard.
Just that premise alone showcases the movie’s biggest crux: For a movie dealing with some very weighty material, it’s incredibly silly in an incredibly distracting way. As she continues to have to deal with this bird, one that loves to dive-bomb her and draw blood, there isn’t anything coming out of interactions beyond what thin meaning the bird’s presence has. The script nor the direction from Theodore Melfi is strong enough to make the scenarios really have any real meaning or weight. In execution, Melfi proves that his award nominations for Hidden Figures were likely a fluke, bringing no individuality to any frame, settling on making Lily’s actions with the bird play like hijinks, wherein she has to duck for cover or fail to get it to go away. Very quickly, any minor subtextual meaning is worn right on its wing, getting across how you can’t ever really shake the struggles life throws at you, but only live with them. A viewer is likely to grasp that at about 25 minutes in, so the rest of the movie just feels like McCarthy fighting with a bird.
To all this there’s meant to be a bit of lightness, perhaps to make everything else go down more smoothly as the film attempts to explore more of the genuinely worthwhile themes. This is ultimately a story about a husband and wife trying to sort through their own feelings after the loss of their daughter. But when the film transitions away from the bird nonsense towards O’Dowd’s Maynard while he’s in a mental health facility, the tonal shifts can be jarring. Maynard’s arc is far more compelling than Lily’s, with a nihilistic viewpoint on life painting a portrait of a man who can’t imagine what going back to his old life would even look like. Whereas Maynard actually has things to say and whose journey feels just about fully realized, Lily’s feels simplistic and never having as much emotional heft. To go back and forth feels like being pushed and pulled between a good and a bad movie.
McCarthy is always reliable even when she’s not given material that makes full use of her gifts like a Can You Ever Forgive Me? (unless we’re talking comedies made with her husband, Ben Falcone), and she’s good here for some nuanced work here and selling a few one-liners. O’Dowd turns in the best work hiding a broken soul behind sarcasm and antipathy towards those trying to help. While McCarthy is doing solid work to try and balance humor with heartache, O’Dowd simply has the material to make his work more enticing to come back to. But, ultimately, Melfi doesn’t have the vision to make much of what anyone’s doing feel more than rudimentary, and with musical cues from an often great Benjamin Wallfisch brimming with the kind of eye-rolling, fake tenderness, much of the movie feels like it’s forcing you to feel rather than earning anything at all.
There are plenty of other top-tier actors making up the supporting cast, but other than the great Kevin Kline getting some droll laughs as a former psychiatrist and current vet who gives Lily all her bird advice (and has his own emotional baggage to work through that feels stuffed into the plot), every single one of them is criminally underused. First, there’s Timoty Olyphant, whose presence as the world’s hottest small-town grocery store manager in three scenes begs why on Earth he’s there at all — other than to chastise Lily about her work effort. Then there’s Daveed Diggs as a worker at the clinic Maynard is at, and who spends most of his time being supportive about the patients’ artwork. Loretta Devine is there to get some levity out of a patient named Velma, while Skylar Gisondo is Lily’s stoner-ish friend in a scene or two. Finally, Laura Harrier’s name is included in the opening credits, but I assume her entire role was about cut, as I’m not sure she even has a real line of dialogue.
The problem with The Starling is that by always opting to beat you over the head with heavyhanded sentimentality fit with music that screams “Tenderness! Tenderness! Feels!”, it can’t help but feel like it’s baiting for your tears rather than win you over with a compelling story or characters. Everything feels so factory-made and shopworn, with a general banality in execution dumbing down anything it has to say worth hearing. It’s humdrum drama at some of its most basic, and sometimes just downright silly, with good performances struggling to lift up scenes that you’ll likely forget by the next one.