It’s About Birds After All

Contrary to 20th Century Fox's evasive marketing campaign, the creators of “The Big Year” managed to make a film about birding that, while not entirely successful, is somewhat entertaining. Beneath the sub-A list cast and B+ direction, it looks like there were actually bird lovers at work.

An took to task the misleading trailer for the movie, which suggested “The Big Year” was some sort of macho competition, "Fear Factor" for guys with binoculars. Steve Martin, Owen Wilson and Jack Black looked like they were prat-falling their way through a “Bucket List” knock-off, not a movie about a highly competitive search for bird species sightings during a calendar year.

Actually, it got worse: a visit to the website thebigyearmovie.com showed that the movie’s PR-department approved descriptions omitted the uncomfortable fact of “birding” from the pitch, even for the three stars’ bios. “Their big year takes them on a cross-country journey of wild and life-changing adventures,” it read. Maybe “Survivor: Competition Clueless”?

If you came into the theater looking for that midlife macho farce, you’re in for a surprise. The first sounds on the sound track are birds chirping in the pre-dawn, and the first words of Jack Black’s narration are, “I love birds.” A montage of avian species and birdsong follows, with Black rapturously describing exactly why he’s enamored. 

Before you can find your way back to the lobby to exchange for “Real Steel,” on comes a mock-historical animated featurette (narrated by John Cleese so you know it’s for fun) describing what a Big Year is, and incidentally setting up the plot by introducing Owen Wilson as Kenny Bostik, the holder of the record of 732 birds sighted.

Recommended: To see this Pythonesque preview, click here.

So far so good for us closet birders. But somebody forgot to tell Owen Wilson that it was a movie about bird watching. He violates just about every common-sense rule about looking for birds, making too much noise, moving too erratically and wearing loud clothes. Seriously: he looks like an Andean cock’o’the rock on crack with his florescent pink polo shirt and designer weather pants. (And those hats, good god: the hats in this movie have been generating comment since August.)

Black is better in character as Brad Harris, one of the three birders we follow over the course of the year, and in many ways the most sympathetic. A stocky kind of guy, hair a little too long and stubble a little too much, he works full time in a nuclear power plant as a computer coder, and undertakes a Big Year because he figures it’s never going to get any better. Somehow the movie becomes about him, probably because his story is the most complex, and fraught with peril: no money, no love live and an antagonistic father, he's our against-all-odds hero.

Steve Martin’s Stu Priessler is a rich corporate executive on the verge of retirement who decides to pursue his unlikely dream. All three of these characters are based on the subjects of Mark Obamscik’s narrative of the pursuit of a world record Big Year in 1998, when Greg Miller, Al Levantin and reigning champ Sandy Komito competed. That was the year the current record of 748 species was set, but there are always challengers.

The characters have different names because they’ve been “screenplayed” into more predictable units, much to our loss. Other plot elements (yes, I read the book) have been manipulated as well, though I have to say turning offshore boating guide Debi Shearwater (her real name) into Annie Auklet was a fortuitous choice.

Then there are several instances when the beauty of birding is given its due, when rare species hover and preen in deep focus as if obliging us with a confirmed sighting - like the Xantu's hummingbird hovering before Martin's eyes in the rain. The end titles, too, endearingly present a flashcard slide show of the 745 bird species seen by "Bostik" in his big year, a dizzying treat for amateur and expert alike.

Still, you won't see any slow-motion, wingtip photography of flocks in flight as in "Winged Migration," a breathtaking documentary of some years back. Now that was a bird-lovers movie: this is just a matinee.

Ultimately, though, the movie tries to be too pleasing to too many people, from fans of Saturday Night Live’s “Wild and Crazy Guy” to Lifetime Channel viewers to Audubon members, even to rock trivia fans whose ears perk up for bird-related songs. (And man, does Jack Black’s cell phone ring tone become irritating.)

Maybe the problem wasn’t trying to mislead in selling the movie, but trying to make birding cool. If it were supposed to be cool, would only 28 million Americans be doing it?