Rare Birds

"Rare Birds" tells of a hapless Newfoundland restaurant owner/cook (Hurt) whose remote seaside restaurant is suffering from insufficient patronage due to a lack of advertising. A quirky friend (Jones) hatches a plot suggesting Hurt report the sighting of a nearly extinct duck to encourage bird watchers to flock to his eatery thereby stimulating his business while he's being stimulated by thoughts of his comely waitress (Parker)...etc. A fun and earnest flick which trudges through it's wry tale relying on understated tongue-in-cheek humor and quirkiness for entertainment, the film includes other salients such as a home made submarine, 22 pounds of cocaine, some much coveted sheet lights, and an RCMP SWAT team for additional substance. Overall, "RB" is a warm hearted little flick for those who don't mind off-kilteredness and the absence of the usual Hollyweird appurtenances. (B-)

Much commentary I have read on this film compares it to "The Shipping News" because it is set in Newfoundland. I would like to stress, however, that this movie is in no other way like "The Shipping News". Thank goodness. "Rare Birds" tells the story of Dave, a struggling restaurant owner who is recently separated from his wife. In order to boost Dave's spirits, and his business fortunes, his crackpot friend Alphonse (or "'Phonse") cooks up a scheme to lure bird watchers to the area. Meanwhile, Dave begins to fall in love with 'Phonse's sister-in-law. This is a charming film due in part to the beautiful scenery of the Newfoundland coast (which was so drearily washed-out in "The Shipping News"). The real gem of this film, however, is Dave's friend, 'Phonse, the inventor who sees conspiracies everywhere and always makes sure to have a "Plan B". I definitely recommend this film for some light, entertaining fare. I gave it a 7.

William Hurt has a failing restaurant in Newfoundland and an estranged wife in Washington D. C. He and friend Andy Jones -- who's building a small submarine -- discover a lot of cocaine in Hurt's wine cellar. After they establish it is good cocaine (so to speak), Hurt starts a rumor that a type of duck thought extinct has been spotted in the bay his isolated restaurant sits on. Suddenly people start showing up to look for the duck and eat, and his first hire is Molly Parker.

It's a very low-key comedy, as the heat develops between Hurt and Miss Parker, Jones' submarine gets an outing, and some guys who are obviously not birders set up in a Winnebago near the restaurant.

Hurt has always been a puzzle to me as a movie star -- and, according to reports, to himself as well. He moves slowly from inert, depressed lump to hopeful lump and I can see the emotional journey, but it's the situations and fog-bound images that held my interest. The movie itself is a paean to the polite eccentrics of Canada.

Rare Birds is indeed a rare find, an original and quirky little comedy, but one that is good when it could have been great. With one step in the wrong direction, Rare Birds takes a bit of a fall from grace, but not too far at least. It remains entertaining, in a way that few comedies are.

Dave runs a small hotel and restaurant in coastal Newfoundland, but business is poor, and he is tempted to close, until his friend Phonce comes up with the idea of faking the sighting of a rare bird on the water that his hotel overlooks (a species of duck thought to be extinct). Suddenly he has a whole army of nutty birdwatchers flocking to his corner of the island. A fun start to the movie, but obviously not fun enough.

For some reason the filmmakers are so desperate to please us that they turn Rare Birds away from charm and towards slapstick. There are a couple of awkward subplots, one involving a mini sub that Phonce has created in his garage and another which involves some military technology that Phonce has stolen which leads to him and Dave taking a secret agent hostage. It all builds up to such absurdity that it literally ends in a bang.

The cast is a strange but charming bunch. Both William Hurt and Molly Parker are likable on screen, but it is Phonce who steals the movie. Everything comedic about Rare Birds revolves around him and the things he does.

Even if the movie looses some of its potential to somewhat banal direction, I think it's pretty hard not to like Rare Birds even a little bit.

I'm a Newfoundlander, so of course I enjoyed "Rare Birds"! There aren't that many movies made in, or about, Newfoundland, and when one does appear, I dash off to see it, regardless of the reviews. I can report, though, that I enjoyed this film, frequently laughing out loud. For some of the laughs, though, you have to know the place and the jargon, and some of the humour might be lost on the average Canadian or American.

(In much the same way, one can feel left out in a foreign-language film - including some British films - when those viewers who actually speak the on-screen language are laughing, and one doesn't get the joke.)

The story is slight, but it more or less works. The main plot involves a chef, David (William Hurt), whose haute-cuisine restaurant, The Auk, near Cape Spear (some 8 miles south and east of St. John's, the capital city) is going fish-belly up, to coin a phrase. According to David's friend Alphonse (Phonse in the local shorthand, and played by Andy Jones, a Newfoundland writer/actor/comic) it's because David hasn't done a proper marketing job, because certainly he has the gourmet skills, as well as a fabulous wine cellar. To revive interest in the restaurant, Phonse hatches (almost literally) a scheme to attract bird-watchers to the area by claiming a sighting of a duck long thought to have been extinct - putatively the "rare bird" of the title, although one suspects that the real "rare birds" are Phonse and David themselves.

(Most Newfoundlanders, and a few others, will know that the Great Auk, the bird for which David's restaurant is named, was hunted to extinction on the Newfoundland coast more than a century ago.)

There are several comic sub-plots in the film, the best of which is Phonse's RSV, the "recreational submarine vehicle" that he has constructed in his shed and which he recruits David to assist him in dive-testing. There is another sub-plot about a 26-pound cache of cocaine that Phonse has found on the shore, and yet another about a bizarre lighting invention from a Bulgarian scientist who was once Phonse's partner. The local RCMP also get into the picture, doing a sort of Atlantic-coast Keystone Kops routine. It's a fragile effort and totally silly, but no-one should really mind seeing Canada's finest portrayed as something like the back-ends of their justly famous steeds for the brief time they're on screen.

The love interest in the film, Alice, who is introduced to the married but separated David by Phonse, is played by the talented and lovely Molly Parker ("Sunshine", and the soon to be released "Hoffman"). She and William Hurt generate very good chemistry, and I came away wishing that the film had made much more of them than it did. (Interestingly, Hurt and Parker were both in "Sunshine", a Canadian co-production, although they never appear on-screen together.)

The story-line of "Rare Birds" is slight enough, and the dialogue is a bit wanting. So, to a very large degree, the film is carried by the hugely talented and accomplished Hurt. He does a kind of "loaves and fishes" miracle with the material at hand, making a near-banquet out of a box-lunch. For the other principals, I was left with the sense that, talented though Andy Jones certainly is, film is not really his medium, although he does well enough. In Molly Parker's case, I didn't feel that she had quite enough opportunity to shine, but when she does have the chance, she is, as always, incandescent.

As expected, the Newfoundland topography, a Rock within a sometimes violent sea, takes a starring role. The rugged landscape, the roiling surf hurling itself against the jagged shore-line, is irresistible. Of course, I'm from the place, and almost any glimpse of the island sets my heart thumping. But - PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!! - will somebody, someday, make a film in Newfoundland that depicts a sunny day. The winters there are long and harsh, spring is not much more than a fond hope, the summers are almost always too short, and the wind blows a great deal of the time. But the sun really does shine, and quite a lot of the time, in all four - alright, three-and-one-half - seasons. Really, it does. You have my word on it. It would be so nice to see a film that actually showed that. Just once.

Go see "Rare Birds". It's worth it, and it's good, clean fun.