Film Review: "The Big Year" is for the Birds

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Saturday, 15 October 2011 10:46

Written by Lloyd Carroll

The Big Year
directed by David Frankel
starring Steve Martin, Jack Black, Owen Wilson

You have to give the filmmakers behind The Big Year credit for this much: at a time when Hollywood is criticized for few original thoughts, it's safe to say there's never been a film about competitive birdwatching. “Big year” is a term birders (they abhor being called “bird watchers”) use for the most passionate -- and generally wealthiest -- fanatics who take a full calendar year off to traipse across North America and compete for the honor of observing the most members of the aviary species.

If you think that sounds like a topic for cable’s National Geographic Channel and not a big screen movie, well you’re right. The film centers around three individuals, Stu Preissler (Steve Martin), Brad Harris (Jack Black) and Kenny Bostick (Owen Wilson), who play friendly at times and not so friendly at others in their joust to become top birder of 2010. The backstories of all three men involve some sort of life crisis. Stu is the CEO of a multi-billion dollar corporation and he wants nothing more at this point in life than to retire and run around the continent with his binoculars. Brad is a 35-year-old with a bad case of arrested development. He works as a computer programmer in the DC area and lives with his parents, played by the always welcome Brian Dennehy and Dianne Weist. He has saved up his money so that he too can run around following birds. Dad thinks he’s cuckoo while mom gives him encouragement and some needed funding.

The most troubled character, though, is Kenny. Bostick, as he's dismissively called, is so preoccupied that someone will break his record of observing 732 different bird species back in 2003 that he embarks on another “big year” much to the chagrin of his wife, Jessica (Rosamund Pike), who hears her biological clock ticking and wants to start a family in her oversized Bergen County home. Kenny is more obsessed with birding than he is with making his wife happy, even though it's clear that he loves her dearly.

While everyone's background stories are interesting, there's very little else to hold your intrigue once things get underway. Rashida Jones, in a prototypical role, plays a shy, sweet birder with whom Brad becomes understandably infatuated. Two wonderfully comic actors, Kevin Pollak and Joel McHale (star of NBC’s terrific Community), are wasted in straightlaced roles as executives in Stu’s company who keep badgering their old boss to return to headquarters and put out ongoing business fires.

Anjelica Huston shines through as a weary tugboat captain with a passionate dislike for Bostick. At a Manhattan press conference sponsored by the film’s distributor, 20th Century-Fox, Steve Martin claimed that the lead characters are “passionate” and not “obsessed.” Just as the Persuaders once sang that it’s a thin line between love and hate, apparently it’s an even thinner one between passion and obsession. I surely won’t be the only critic to use this line but it must be said: The Big Year is for the birds.

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