Pretty Bird is a hard film to get a handle on, and it’s hard to say exactly why. At it’s base, the story is sound (and it’s clear that, despite its ‘inspired by actual events’ tag, it was more than willing to make the necessary adjustments to make itself entertaining), and its leads are well-cast (particularly Paul Giamatti). But in some nebulous film ozone, some open space between story and character, the film has failed to engage the mysterious x factor that creative people like to think that they understand, but is really the professional equivalent of the golden goose that could start laying rotten eggs at any moment. It doesn't work, but there's no single facet that can be pointed to on which to blame its failure, which is a slightly longer way of saying that you're never sure why you're not entertained.
Curtis Prentiss (Billy Crudup) is a man who isn’t very good at science, and he certainly doesn’t know how to make anything work, but he is very talented at one thing: talking a good game. With all the finesse of an especially skilled car salesman, Prentiss manages to get his mattress salesman friend Kenny (David Hornsby) to fund his latest dream: the rocket belt, which is essentially a somewhat retrograde version of a jet pack. But Prentiss doesn’t only need money: he also needs someone who can build it. Enter Rick Honeycutt (Giamatti), a recently laid-off aerospace engineer who’s looking to get involved in something where his work won’t be undercut by the greed of attention-seeking bureaucrats. At first, the relationship between Prentiss and Honeycutt is sort of tenuous, then productive, and finally tense, as their two visions for the future become mutually exclusive, and their personal desires for fame and recognition drive them into more and more desperate situations.
If anyone ever finds a suitable phrase to describe the quality that makes a film compelling on a scene-by-scene basis, he or she should be sure to copyright it and get a nickel every time that some Hollywood type uses it. For the time being, I’ll use ‘dynamic tension,’ and I’ll go ahead and say that Pretty Bird doesn’t have it. From the first time that we meet Curtis Prentiss, it’s unclear exactly what Crudup’s approach to the character is, and thus what ours is supposed to be. He smiles, he charms, and he rolls through with a confident gusto that could very well sort out the pieces of his ridiculous schemes on his own. Taken at face value, he’s the exact sort of cock-eyed dreamer that people seem to instinctively like, whether or not he succeeds. But there’s a void at the center of his character, and it’s more than a little disquieting, particular when Crudup seems to show outright contempt for him. Prentiss seems to have given so little thought to everything that he’s doing, and his willingness to employ other people in his schemes so reckless, that you can’t help but question his motives for doing so, and feel that his success would represent the completion of Prentiss’s corruption. This only gets worse once Honeycutt enters the picture, because, as antisocial and unpleasant as he can be, he does actually know what he’s doing, and could very well provide the missing features that Prentiss’s business needs.
But even if we particularly wanted either one of them to succeed (which is pretty hard to do), it’s not as if the film builds up any momentum towards a particularly satisfying conclusion. Scenes happen in which Prentiss says odd things (frequently with the same sort of confused wordplay typical of Michael Scott on The Office), Honeycutt gets mad, and Kristen Wiig plays a worker at the mattress store who contributes essentially nothing to the plot. Basically, the movie feels more like a platform for occasionally clever line readings rather than a vehicle for anything to happen. And even when it does, it moves with so little direction that it’s hard to believe that it's typically irrelevant several scenes afterward.
A few films have been able to pull off loose narratives, but few to none of those films have involved corporate power struggles or jet packs, or other things that usually produce even mild friction in the imagination. They're about more mundane things, and they have at least the barest empathy and respect for their characters. Pretty Bird, on the other, has a subject matter that seems to demand excitement, but stubbornly refuses to provide it.
Bonus Features
The disc also contains a couple of previews.
"Pretty Bird" is on sale June 29, 2010 and is rated R. Comedy. Written and directed by Paul Schneider. Starring Billy Crudup, David Hornsby, Kristen Wiig, Paul Giamatti.
