nightlydvdreviewWinged Creatures
March 25th 2010 08:39
Dakota Fanning tackles this challenging role with success
Winged Creatures revolves around one awful event: a man walks into a diner and shoots at random. Lives are fractured; the hapless victims do what little they can to reconcile themselves to the shocking attack.
The film clearly adopts what is a gritty narrative convention of American film, yet it is the work of Australian director Rowan Woods, who has shown his talent previously with Little Fish and The Boys. It aspires to be the successor to Magnolia, Babel, Crash, and 21 Grams in its depiction of the grim struggle characters face. They seek to achieve reconciliation and atonement after a traumatic experience, which impacts on them all in different ways. Aided by the realism of disjointedness through a time-trick structure and the clever use of flashback to slowly reveal the story, Winged Creatures progresses steadily but without suspense towards a surprising denouement which ties together parallel lives and lies.
Dakota Fanning gives an intelligent performance as Anne, who quickly finds religion and Forest Whitaker evokes much pity as the gambling Charlie. Yet, from the large ensemble cast, many of the characters are never fully developed. Guy Pearce’s Dr Bruce Laraby, in particular, remains largely inaccessible. Ultimately his performance does little more than go through the motions.
The score is workmanlike in capturing the mood of the film and conveying emotion, but it fails to lift the film significantly. In many ways, this is symptomatic of the whole film; it replicates all of the conventions of this recently emerged genre but Rowan Woods should have been more concerned with making it strikingly original rather than conforming to what others have done before him.
Winged Creatures is effective without being powerful or consistently engaging, and we have come to expect more from films such as this.
2.5 STARS
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