jacmtl-08532 Review of Birthmarked

Birthmarked (2018)

A really poor script destroys an interesting concept

[2/10 · 19 March 2019]

Others in this string have pointed out, justifiably, how much this film tries to catch the tone of a Wes Anderson film - and fails quite badly. When a film is pretty much wall-to-wall narration, you know that the writers simply could not find their way into the story. The first 10 minutes are pure, raw exposition - mostly about the past of the parents - information that is supposed to by dryly ironic and funny - it is neither. After laying so much expositional pipe, the writers then proceed to ignore the emotional heart of the story - the children. They labour under the false impression that this is a story about the parents (they can't even decide on which parent is the actual protagonist!) almost completely overlooking the far, far richer ground offered by the kids. The nature/nurture debate is barely dramatized - instead, we are presented a series of more-or-less discrete episodic events that never accrete to form as world we can accept and believe in. There is never a really, deeply felt and earned moment of self realisation on the part of the parents - no, "OMG, what have we done!" moment that would at least redeem them somewhat. But this does not deter the filmmakers from forcing a completely unearned moment of reconciliation at the end when the family is momentarily reunited at the kid's private school and watch, gormless and idiotically, as their family history of warm intimate moments unspools in one of the son's film project. Didn't the director understand that these moments, or at least some of them, had to have been seen prior to this moment? Didn't he realized that we, as an audience, had to live through at least some of these good times in order for the little home movie to mean something to us? The screenplay is truly awful - poorly structured, much too reliant on voice-over, lingers far too long on irrelevant and redundant exposition and never gets under the skin of the characters. the greatest fault is perhaps that the filmmakers could never decide who story they wanted to tell. What is worst for English Quebec cinema is that the filmmakers had everything they needed to be successful: a great cast, a committerd producer, lovely cinematography, beautiful locations - they just forgot to bring the essentials; imagination and a script doctor who would have put them right. This is a poor sophomore feature effort from the team who did the spare but excellent "Whitewash."