Marla may not be a monster, but she is as pathetic and repulsive as any screen character in memory - and so lost to herself and the surrounding world, for example, that when Owen is hospitalized and given a very slim chance of survival, she at first barely seems to register any emotion. Edmands uses the two young women (who aren't acquainted firsthand) to create a twinning effect. In fact, though, the little boy's fate only constitutes one strand of a much larger tapestry. From the above summary, the accident involving Owen may sound like the focal point of the movie. Watching this film feels akin to witnessing a tragic, cataclysmic accident in slow motion, and knowing that numerous innocent lives will soon be destroyed - while experiencing almost complete helplessness and paralysis that make intercession impossible. The next morning, Lesley discovers the little boy, who has spent the night trapped on the bus and is nearly frozen to death. That evening, Crystal assumes that Owen is with Marla, and Marla passes out while drinking and popping pills in her bathtub. In the process, she fails to notice Owen, napping in one of the rear seats. Disaster strikes when Lesley finishes her afternoon bus run by checking the back of the vehicle, but gets distracted by a bluebird that flies in through a window. Their daughter, 17-year-old Paula (Emily Meade) is a sweet girl who projects an unimpeachable innocence - a baby-faced naif so susceptible to the flattery of local boys that when a loser from her class named Brent (Brandon Wardwell) attempts to win her favor with an offhanded reference to a cheap old love song and a five-cent ring from a vending machine, she instantly caves. Meanwhile, we meet the Dyers, a local family who - at least on the surface - appear to be more cohesive and ideal - dad Richard (John Slattery) works outdoors, running a logging machine, while mom Lesley (Amy Morton) drives the local schoolbus. She is so unfit to raise her little boy, Owen (Quinn Bard), that he has fallen into the partial custody of Marla's more respectable middle-aged mother, Crystal (Margo Martindale). One concerns Marla (Louisa Krause) - a prescription-addicted, alcohol-swilling single mother in her early-mid 20s, who had a child at 17 and now waits tables at a local Chinese restaurant. Edmands intercuts two stories with ties that only gradually become clear to us. This gives the film an intensity so jarring that at times, we nearly feel compelled to turn away.The drama unfolds in a Maine mill town, amid the subzero deadness of January.
Writer-director Lance Edmands intuitively gets both of these tendencies and nails them onscreen, throughout his hypnotically powerful feature debut, Bluebird. The other strain of melancholia pervasive in working-class USA is tied to a kind of Sisyphean futility each new generation carries hopes for deliverance from its sad environment (and from broken home lives) - hopes that rise and often die, like waves perpetually brought forth from the sea only to crash into the surf. Life in blue collar Middle America often carries a foreboding quality - you can sense some apocalypse lingering in the distance, that sits just out of sight, just over the horizon.
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