Time to eat crow. I was sure a film about competitive birders was gonna be a turkey. Probably a little hard to swallow that The Big Year is likeable, especially given the goose-eggs that Owen Wilson, Jack Black and Steve Martin have all given us of late. It would be easy right now to parrot my usual rhetoric of distaste.
A “Big Year” refers to the January 1 to December 31 contest of the North American tern-like migration of hobbyists flocking to capture by sight or sound as many different species of bird as is humanly possible. The best among them strut their conquests like peacocks. Birding, not “bird watching”, please, is not just for the eagle-eyed, but the deep-pocketed. Brad (Jack Black) is our ugly duckling. The monied swans Kenny (Wilson) and Stu (Martin) are limited only by responsibility, not pocketbook.
The three all have personal albatrosses hindering their ability to take on a big year: Brad is short funds and his coot of a father (Brain Dennehy) regards his hobby as a lark. Stu is stalked by vultures from work; Kenny’s wife Jessica (Rosamund Pike) is nesting and grouses about his inability to stay home. There’s a delightful underlying feeling in The Big Year that birders are loons. In turn, this suggests all enthusiastic, nay near-insane, hobbyists are lovable dodos. Yeah, there’s a bit of predatory behavior from the best birder, Kenny: hawking the good spots, setting up the fellow competitors as pigeons. Yet Kenny is not really a raptor — The Big Year is often without a metaphorical falcon to claim the smaller birds; every birder respects the desire of a fellow to see a booby or two. It’s hard to hate a film which sees all of its characters in one way or another as inquisitive owlets.
Why did I like this dying quail of a film? Would I rather be chicken than Courageous? Certainly. Am I raven about The Big Year? No. Big Year is less a comedy and more a tribute to the golden egg seeker in all of us, the one who lives without (r)egret.
Rated PG, 101 Minutes
D: David Frankel
W: Howard Franklin
Genre: Obsession
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Ornithologists
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: the anti-frivolous
