Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

The 1988 movie "Bird," produced and directed by Clint Eastwood, looks and sounds very good and has a very fine performance in the title role by Forest Whitaker as bebop inventor, saxophonist Charlie Parker, but is unsatisfying. The movie runs 160 minutes, yet has practically no narrative or character development.

After a brief, opaque scene of a young black saxophonist, the rolly-poly adult (Whitaker) comes home with trepidation about whether his wife Chan (Diane Venora) will let him in. As in almost all the scenes in which she is present, she looks concerned. Looking concerned and not breaking with her junkie husband are all her part (in Joel Oliansky's screenplay) call for or allow her. When he screws up in one way or another, she looks mildly disappointed, but never angry or hurt or even disapproving. Other than waiting to cosset the Bird who has flown the coop, she has no apparent life. Maybe the real Chan Parker was like that, but the Chan/Charlie relationship is entirely lacking in drama (contrast Lee Krassner in "Pollock").

There is one scene in which Charlie tries to explain his bebop breakthrough to trumpeter " Red" Rodney (Michael Zelniker). That is the only scene in which there is an attempt to explain anything about Parker's character or music. There is another scene in which he pleads with "Red" not to feel he has to follow him in drug-taking as well as in music, but after 160 minutes the viewer (at least this viewer) knows little more about what made Charlie Parker tick (either as a musician or a self-destructive drug and alcohol abuser) than before seeing "Bird." Part of the reason for this, is that most of the movie takes place during the last months of his life, rather than showing the start of the path as biopics usually do. (In this, is resembles the great French movie about the wreckage of jazz collosus Lester Young, "Round Midnight.")

Forest Whitaker is a very genial presence. As in "The Crying Game" and "Ghost Dog," the audience doesn't want anything bad to happen to him, certain as premature death is for the characters he plays (Parker was only 36, thought the coroner estimated he was 65 when he examined the corpse). Maybe Whitaker can't do being driven by internal demons? Or maybe it is the script that called upon him to be resigned to addiction but trying to persuade others to stay off drugs, to be all sweet and helplessly doomed.

As in most movies by white directors about nonwhite people, the relationship that is most developed and made very central is one with a sympathetic white character (for the majority audience to identify with, I think). "Red" is not particularly heroic, but the liveliest parts of the movie show "Red" taking "Bird" and three of his sideman to a well-paying gig at a Jewish wedding and then "Bird" adopting "Red" into his combo and touring the Deep South with "Red" billed as an albino Negro (so that the group presents itself as not being racially integrated). Is it too much of a leap into attributing motives to speculate that the sometimes jazz musician Eastwood fantasized about (or identified with) such acceptance by a jazz master? (There is also the possibility that Eastwood, an underrecognized master (as a director), identifies with Parker. He had cast himself as the alcoholic guitarist in "Honkytonk Man," though Eastwoods's long career shows no signs of self-destructiveness or lack of discipline!)

There are intermittent encounters between "Bird" and "Dizzy" Gillespie (played by Samuel E. Wright). "Dizzy" is the wise man of the movie, very well aware that martyrs are remembered and those who behave responsibly and take care of business tend to be forgotten. Trying to counsel "Bird" off his path to self-destruction. "Dizzy" tells "Bird": "If they kill me, it won't be because I helped them." Whitaker's Parker understands the message, but is unable to do anything about it. A good analysis of a situation remains far from solving it.)

Parker is harassed in almost "Les Miserables" style by a federal DEA agent, but that only speeds the process—the inexorable process of self-destruction for which there is no explanation onscreen. It seems (within the genre of doomed genuis movies) just be part of being a creative genius. (I've already alluded to "Pollock," but both than and "Lady Sings the Blues" show more of the life of the artist before the final crack-up.)

Having gone on at length about my dissatisfactions, I want to close by reiterating that the Jack Green's rainy night-time cinematography looks very good (and the funeral procession under the closing credits has some impressive vintage cars by daylight) and that the musical soundtrack is great. Parker's playing was extracted from original recordings (some never released) and rerecorded with new sidemen, so there is a real sense in which Charlie Parker himself provided the soundtrack. Maybe if I'd approached "Bird" as a very long music video instead of a biographical narrative I'd have been less concerned about motivation and development of characters and plot?


Recommended: No

Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age