Surely a richer human comedy can be made about an eccentric subculture of obsessive birders than "The Big Year," in which Steve Martin, Jack Black and Owen Wilson spend a lot of time peering through binoculars at one species or another.
Curious audiences will not be subjected to "Little Fockers"-level slapstick here. This is a gentle, diffident concoction.
But it has barely enough pulse to power a hummingbird.
Economic recessions tend to bring out the "must be nice!" response in movie audiences. Since "The Big Year" concerns three men (one rich, one pretty rich, one not) who spend 12 months and untold thousands of recreational dollars crisscrossing North America racking up sightings and vying for the title of world's greatest birder, the makers of this film can reasonably expect a certain amount of must-be-nice in response.
Screenwriter Howard Franklin goes his own way with the nonfiction book of the same name, inventing a trio of characters based a teeny-tiny bit on real-life central figures chronicled by journalist Mark Obmascik. Our leader, the one who narrates, is Brad, a divorced computer whiz played by Black. He dreams of embarking on a "big year," which in the birding universe means near-constant, often last-minute travel to various climates and locales, from the desert to the Everglades to the Aleutian Islands. Brad dreams of besting the birding record-holder, a contractor (Wilson) who once identified 732 separate species in a year. His blase confidence in breaking his own record provokes the competitive industrialist played by Martin.
The birding, of course, is handily symbolic as well as literal. Brad dives headlong into this world partly to escape the confines of an ordinary life, and like the Paul Giamatti character in the infinitely more distinctive wonky-subculture comedy "Sideways," he favors the species of birds others tend to overlook. (Brian Dennehy and Dianne Wiest, nicely cast, play Brad's parents.) Through birding, he meets a fellow obsessive played by Rashida Jones, the brightest spot in a mild picture. The Wilson character turns his consuming preoccupation into a wall separating him from his wife (Rosamund Pike), with whom he is having fertility challenges. Martin's character, meantime, is becoming a grandfather and sees birding as a way of keeping both the burdens of his millions and questions of mortality at bay.
The three men are not quite friends and not quite enemies, and while a different sort of schlocky Hollywood treatment of "The Big Year" might've gone hog wild with humiliating tit-for-tat competitive strategies, director David Frankel settles for mellower stuff, pleasant when it's working (which is occasionally), blandly noncommittal when it's not. Actors on the order of Anjelica Huston (as a coastal Oregon seafarer) come and go without making much of an impression, which is saying something. I like nearly everybody on screen in "The Big Year," but the material's so intent on avoiding caricature or indeed any sort of social satire, it neglects to make the characters any sort of funny.
'The Big Year'
Grade: Two stars
Genres: Comedy
Running Time: 100 minutes
MPAA Rating: PG
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