'The Starling': Melissa McCarthy & Chris O'Dowd Offer Emotional Range In A Cloying, Overly-Sentimental Movie [TIFF Review]

Reuniting with “St. Vincent,” director Theodore Melfi, Melissa McCarthy, and Chris O’Dowd play a married couple on the rocks after the unexpected loss of their baby tears them apart. Calibrated as a crowd-pleaser like their previous collaboration, which had its world premiere at the 2014 Toronto International Film Festival where it was runner-up for the audience award, “The Starling” is the kind of cloying, overly sentimental treacle that often gets labeled uplifting, but whose seams show like a mass-produced discount t-shirt.

McCarthy plays Lily, who has spent the last year since her daughter’s death from SIDS (Sudden infant death syndrome), holding down the fort at home and at the grocery store where she works, channeling her grief through keeping a Sno-Ball display obsessively ordered. Her husband Jack (O’Dowd), it’s revealed, has not handled their daughter’s death so well and was placed in the care of a mental health facility. After a nasty group therapy session, Jack’s therapist recommends Lily visit her old colleague Dr. Larry Fine (Kevin Kline), who, unbeknownst to Lily, has left the mental health profession and now works as a veterinarian.

This quirky turn of events works in Lily’s favor as she’s currently battling in her garden with a territorial starling. We’re introduced to the titular bird in a particularly ridiculous bout of CGI in which Dr. Fine’s receptionist Fawn (Rosalind Chao) throws away a Luna bar wrapper, its shininess attracting the bird to such an extent that it follows it across a highway (in which we, of course, see Lily driving) and even fights off another bird for it mid-air. At this point, the Luna bar is also made of terrible CGI. The starling wins and takes it back to its nest and its mate located in – you guessed it – a tree in Lily’s back yard.

The persistence of the CGI bird culminates in one of the most ridiculous interactions between a genuinely great actor and literally nothing I’ve ever seen. It’s almost award-worthy how deeply McCarthy commits to the bit of holding a CGI bird in her palms like she’s Snow White.

Lily allows McCarthy a role that shows her complete range, from slapstick pratfalls, anger that tottles between humor and terrifying, to that deep well of emotion we’ve seen from her in better films like Marielle Heller’s “Can You Ever Forgive Me?”. Unfortunately, Matt Harris’ weak script and Melfi’s heavy-handed direction betray the talent at the heart of the film’s cast.

Melfi clearly never met a visual metaphor that was too much, with such fawning over the new life of vegetables or baby birds, and other ways of showing that life, as the Beatles say, goes on. All it takes is enough cheap moments to get over real, deep grief and trauma apparently.

Subtly is also missing from Harris’ script, which was on the 2005 Black List of best-unproduced screenplays, relying on monologue after monologue of pseudo-psychology ripped straight from Chicken Soup For The Soul. Luckily, McCarthy, O’Dowd, and Kline are so good at what they do they almost manage to overcome the vapidity of these monologues, but after nearly two hours of people speaking like mindfulness exercises rather than any kind of real conversation the goodwill built by their strong performances wears thin.

McCarthy and Kline have an easy chemistry together, their comic timing a perfect match. However, Kline’s character’s inclusion into the story never really gels. It’s not clear why we needed him in this story, other than to have both a therapist for Lily to bounce words off of that also can help her patch up the poor metaphorical starling after she accidentally knocks it out of the air with a rock.

The rest of the supporting cast also feels out of place. Timothy Olyphant as Lily’s boss at the grocery store and Loretta Divine as a kooky fellow patient of Jack’s both fall heavily into stereotype, spouting lines clearly intended for laughs but never once feeling like lived in people. Only Daveed Diggs as an art therapist ever comes close to feeling like someone you maybe have actually met in real life.

As if the script and direction were not saccharine enough, Melfi employs original songs by The Lumineers, Jonah and the Lion, and Brandi Carlile over many of the sequences in which Lily is supposedly working through her grief. Ordinarily, I’m here for a good needle drop, but these songs do all the heavy lifting to show her emotional growth. McCarthy is good enough; she could have carried those scenes without any help and deserves a director who trusts her enough to let her do just that.

The metaphor at the center of the film is that starlings are monogamous birds that mate for life, so we know that Lily and Jack will work through this rough patch. But starlings are also an invasive species in North America, introduced in 1890 by the American Acclimatization Society, dedicated to introducing European flora and fauna to North America. These birds are known for ravaging crops and forcing out native bird species around the country. Building an entire metaphor for relationships around such a bird is about as misbegotten as the film’s execution itself.

It’s nice to see McCarthy and O’Dowd in roles that showcase their emotional range; one just wishes it were in a project worthy of their talents. [C-]

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