The Starling review: Grief knows not what grief does
'The Starling' could have been a cathartic experience of a drama. It is not.
Popular opinion--Melissa McCarthy, Tiffany Haddish, Amy Schumer can dissect any piece of insipid writing and turn it/them into an absolute comedy gold, if they choose to, that is. So this venturing into drama seemed like one that an otherwise stellar Melissa McCarthy could pull off--like Jennifer Aniston had in 'Cake', or even Vanessa Kirkby in 'Pieces of a Woman', both broken beyond repair over loss of children.
But, this supermarket employee has other battles to fight. Just outside, in the backyard of her pretty home, Lily (Melissa McCarthy)'s wrestling with a stubborn starling bird that refuses to leave the property. An uninspiring and far-too-easy metaphor for Lily's trauma and the ideation that grief is never a straight line. Tsk, tsk!
If the aloof yet social wife buries the heaviness of her heart in the mundanity of her regular life, the husband seems to be spiraling: Jack (Chris O’Dowd) is parked at a psychiatric facility. Both McCarthy and O'Dowd, as a middle-aged couple dissociated by tragedy, evince what an everyman with meagre means would do in the face of adversity.
Theodore Melfi (Hidden Figures), the director, however, squeezes the broad spectrum of love and loss into his hurried, one-hour-45-minutes-long version of events we all are now made to call 'The Starling'.
The film neither has the splintering of one's moral compass at its heart like 'Cake'--an obscure like 'The Starling'--nor does it have the raw, rugged anger of a mother like Kirkby's in 'Pieces of a Woman'. It, in fact, didn't even echo the subtleties of Casey Affleck's big-league Oscar entry 'Manchester By The Sea'. Frankly, 'The Starling' is loud and obnoxious: about life, death, therapists, metaphors, and similes.
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A work-in-progress couple, a couthieMcCarthy... 'The Starling' could have been a cathartic experience of a drama. Instead, it is just an introductory guidebook towhat personal loss feels like to some.
The Starling is now streaming on Netflix.