Yellow Bird

I don't generally write about movies, but when I do, it's because they are really good

Yellow Bird producer/director/actor Angus Benfield

All of you who follow my work either here on Howlin’ at the Moon in ii-V-I or in the Idaho State Journal are aware of my disdain for critics. Show me a vicious review of a work of art, and I’ll generally be able to point straight to a no-talent art wannabe. Show me a monomaniacal calldown of a professional athlete, and I’ll show you a person who used to be the last chosen in a game of pickup—and then only if everyone else needed one more for the same number on both teams. Show me a critic who slams musical artists for their professional choices, and I’ll show you a jealous musician.

I’m probably an odd choice to offer strong opinions in defense of athletes and artists. I spent my entire professional career as a physicist working unathletically at a desk, mostly with the left side of my brain. But I get it. Before I was a physicist, I was a semi-professional athlete. I’ve loved art since I was old enough to know what it was. I’ve played music for nearly five decades. All of these things mean something to me. I respect people who are better at them than me (almost everyone).

Back in the 1990s, I owned a production company. I had the opportunity to work with a half-dozen Grammy Award-winning musical artists and several internationally renown theater and dance groups. It was great fun but a real eye-opener.

This part of my career culminated with the 2002 Winter Olympics, where I was the engineer of the house for the Eccles Center in Park City, UT. There I worked with, among others, Eileen Ivers, Alvin Ailey Dance, and Moses Pendleton/Momix Dance to premiere original works during the Olympic festival. The amount of ass-busting hard work that went into these productions was astonishing, even to a relative insider such as myself. People pour every bit of their hearts and souls into these shows. It’s an awesome thing to behold.

I’ve also worked as a physics consultant on a few History/Discovery Channel-type shows, most notably Penn and Teller. Again, the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes by really talented people to produce a TV show, regardless of quality, is way beyond anything you’d likely imagine without seeing it firsthand. The people involved in show business work hard, often for outcomes they can’t control.

Athletes are the same way. Yeah, LeBron missed a dunk in last night’s Laker loss to Denver. So what? LeBron James has worked his entire life to perform in situations that most people can’t even realistically dream about. He’s entitled to make a mistake every once in a while without those with little more in their athletic portfolio than a 6-inch vertical leap offering expert advice on how they’d have nailed that dunk.

Just in case I have not made my case plain enough, critics can bite me.

Every movie and TV show ever made, whether good, bad, or in between, had writers, directors, producers, actors, and various technical and production personnel working as hard as they could towards what they hoped would be a good outcome. It’s an incredibly difficult process that, by some miracle, occasionally produces something great. But even when the results are not great, those people still put in the work. I respect that, even if some of the world does not.

Last night, after spending several hours in my studio, I went to bed late. My wife is working the night shift this week, so I spent a few minutes looking around for a movie to watch while I fell asleep. I’m a fan of independent films, and I was a bit surprised when what looked like an indie popped up at the top of my list on Amazon Prime. The film was Yellow Bird. It’s the best 1 hour and 40 minutes I’ve spent with a movie in years.

Actually, truth be told, it was three hours and 20 minutes, since I watched it twice.

Yellow Bird, brilliantly written by Tony Jerris and starring Bryan Doyle-Murray, the wonderful Kathy Garver, and newcomer Michael Maclane, is a tour de force by producer, director, and lead actor Angus Benfield. There is simply no bad performance or wasted moment anywhere in the film.

Yellow Bird starts off as an over-the-top, almost campy comedy. But each subsequent moment and every character in the film draw the audience into an unexpectedly affecting denouement that is an affirmation of the human spirit.

Yellow Bird is one of the most poignant and humane films I’ve seen in years. It doubtless cost Mr. Benfield a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to make up for a budget that might have been $11 to make the film. Yet Yellow Bird puts every contemporary, high-dollar, effects-laden studio film to shame. You should watch it.

Yellow Bird ranks among my all-time favorite films, and for the same reasons. It’s an honest, slice-of-life film that cares about its characters despite their imperfections.

There’s no pandering in Yellow Bird, and there are no easy paths forward. The characters in the movie make mistakes, and in this regard, this film is unyielding, but there is also acknowledgement and redemption. In the end, despite setbacks, the characters are all in better places—and not because of an ET in a bicycle handlebar basket either. They are better off because they engaged in the human struggle to change.

That’s something that’s not easy. Yellow Bird makes this clear in two brilliant scenes, one involving a gnome, a bottle of $2000 whiskey, and Jake Rush (Benfield), and the other involving a dumpster at the very end of the film.

I’m reluctant to compare films because I’m not inside the mind of the filmmaker(s). I can’t gauge their intent. I can only gauge what I see on the screen and relate that to my personal frame of reference. But with that caveat, this film reminds me favorably of Breaking Away for its honesty and trajectory and Fandango for character development (yeah, I know, I’m no Pauline Kael). The aforementioned scene with the yard gnome and whiskey packs, a Martin Scorsese money shot aside, the same emotional punch as Travis Bickle in the hallway scene on the phone with Betsy in Taxi Driver.

You should find Yellow Bird on Amazon or perhaps at your local art house cinema (where I wish I’d seen it) as soon as possible. It’s a wonderful film; it’s getting some well-deserved buzz, and my hat is off to everyone involved. I think that Mr. Benfield just might have a budget bigger than what I spend on guitar strings for his next project.

This column concludes my short-lived career as a film reviewer.