Woodpecker

Woodpecker (Director: Alex Karpovsky): Hope, Emily Dickinson taught us, is the thing with feathers:

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chil­liest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

— Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

Perhaps it’s fit­ting, then, that the sub­ject of Johnny Neander’s quest is a bird: the legendary Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, last spotted in the 1940s. A rash of recent sight­ings near the town of Brinkley, Arkansas bring part-time house painter and ama­teur poet Johnny and his silent pal Wesley to town, where they will attempt to be the first people to obtain doc­u­mentary proof of the woodpecker’s return. Making a comeback when you seem to be gone forever turns out to be a central theme of this unusual film. Shooting in a documentary-fiction hybrid, Karpovsky gradu­ally moves from one to the other as we learn more about our central char­acter. When the film begins, Johnny is just one among a number of bird­watchers and locals talking about the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker. We hear from local people, many of whom are delighted that the atten­tion has brought tour­ists and busi­ness back to their dying town, but a few who resent the res­ulting pro­tec­tion of the bird’s hab­itat, denying them the right to hunt ducks there. Within a few weeks, how­ever, it seems like most of the searchers have given up and gone home. Well, except for Johnny and Wes.

We soon learn that this is much more than a bird­watching exped­i­tion for Johnny. It becomes a quest for per­sonal redemp­tion, and as he trudges through the bayou with the hap­less Wes in tow, we are treated to his incessant philo­soph­ical chat­tering and poetry read­ings. While they are indeed hil­arious, as the days go by, we begin to sense the des­per­a­tion and sad­ness in the men’s quest. Though Wes is strictly a sidekick, we learn that he’s there due to his own per­sonal tragedy. Johnny just doesn’t want to be a loser any­more, and his dis­com­fort with his own life makes him yearn for the freedom that birds seem to enjoy.

The clever thing is that the wood­pecker can so easily stand in for almost any other elu­sive thing that humans search for. Karpovsky could easily have set the film in, say, Roswell, New Mexico and had his prot­ag­onist searching for aliens. But that would have been going for easy laughs at his character’s expense. Instead, the film offers many poignant moments that allow us to identify with Johnny. By the second half of the film, we’re almost in Waiting for Godot ter­ritory, where the absurdity is tightly wrapped up with the over­whelming longing for tran­scend­ence that many of us feel. In fact, it’s no sur­prise at all that the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker’s nick­name is “Lord God Bird.” The mix­ture of comedy and mel­an­choly works better in my mind, in fact, than the hybrid of doc­u­mentary and fic­tion, which begins to feel a bit unwieldy as soon as we’ve formed an emo­tional attach­ment to Johnny and Wes.

Perhaps fit­tingly, Johnny is played by an actor (Jon e. Hyrns) whom Karpovsky dis­covered in a doc­u­mentary (Johnny Berlin) made about his career as a porter on a 1930s Pullman railway car. Hyrns, who co-wrote the script, is not sur­pris­ingly also a nov­elist, and his storytelling gifts serve the film well.

One of the script’s greatest achieve­ments, in my mind, is in the pitch-perfect poetry that Johnny writes about birds. Of course, the poems are hil­arious, but at the same time they pos­sess a heart­felt hon­esty that, while not on a level with Emily Dickinson, man­ages to convey the pain that Johnny is so des­perate to escape. The entire film is a suc­cessful blending of comedy and pathos that lets us cel­eb­rate hope, no matter how crazy.

Official site of the film

(8/10)

Tagged as: birdwatching, hope, independent, obsession