The Travolta/Cage Project #11 Birdy (1984)

Birdy is not a movie that calls for good acting. It calls for great ACTING! It’s a film that wears its ambitions and its artistry proudly, that takes itself very seriously and expects the audience to do likewise. 

On the Travolta/Cage episode where we discuss Birdy and Moment by Moment, two very dissimilar films that share a fascinatingly uncommented upon gay subtext, the great Alonso Duralde talked about his journey with Birdy, how he went from seeing it as a profound and powerful masterpiece of the cinema as a young man to seeing it as an artful and sometimes moving film as an adult, but also one with a hopelessly adolescent conception of melodrama. 

I understand where he’s coming from. Birdy is a very shallow person’s conception of a deep movie. It’s powered by symbolism that could not get any creakier or more heavy-handed, particularly in its central metaphor of flight as a means of emotional and spiritual transcendence. 

Parker’s work is similarly unsubtle. The cult filmmaker faced a formidable challenge in adapting a novel where the conflict is overwhelmingly internal and the main character largely silent into a visually dynamic film. The direction here is as ballsy and intense as the acting and a script that’s nothing but big scenes and big emotions, particularly in a bravura late scene that uses a new device called a Skycam that functions as a sort of flying steadicam to realize Birdy’s lifelong fantasies of flight. 

Birdy is so shamelessly, unapologetically melodramatic that there were times when I almost felt like I was watching one of the painfully cliched war movies satirized in Tropic Thunder but if Birdy sometimes lapses into overwrought self-parody it’s still an enormously affecting look at the never-ending psychological costs of war. 

Watching Birdy I realized that I had confused it with the Vietnam movie Streamers all my life. That makes sense since Streamers also stars Matthew Modine and involves Vietnam and homosexuality and was directed by a major filmmaker in Robert Altman. Modine would go on to make one more Vietnam movie in the 1980s with a big shot filmmaker in Full Metal Jacket.