A must see this holiday season, particularly as Hanukkah approaches, and with many of us still praying for a miracle for the hostages in Gaza (at the time of this writing, October 16, 2024, 101 still trapped after over a year of captivity), is the movie White Bird.
Helen Mirren, playing the grandmother of a teenage boy named Julian, sets out to share some profound lessons about bullying and exclusion – but ultimately also about the power of kindness – by finally relaying ‘her story’.
In so doing, Mirren transports us all to the terror-filled period of Jews running and hiding and being subject to humiliation, round ups, deportation and genocide in Nazi-occupied France.
The portraits of characters you may well retain the most, however, are those of the courageous ‘righteous’ gentiles (Gillian Anderson offers a particularly poignant performance) who risked their own lives to save Jews. Stellar portrayals by newcomers Ariella Glaser and Orlando Schwerdt depict teenagers around whom the story of survival revolves.
The terrible hate and meanness depicted in the movie would leave anyone despondent. But it’s the acts of kindness that leave you breathless and hopeful for humankind.
White Bird, an amalgam of several stories, according to one of its executive producers and its screenplay writer Mark Bomback, was born from the graphic and groundbreaking best-selling novel Wonder by R.J. Palacio.
The book’s message was ultimately about the value of being kind to other people, said Bomback, a father of four in Chappaqua. “It’s a miracle that the book became so popular with such an uncynical message,” he said.
“There’s a tendency, not just among groups, but even among individuals, to be callous to one another, to close yourself off, whether through social media, or because you are aligned with one group,” Bomback continued, “and to decide that you can’t possibly interact with the other group, yet it’s kindness that is ultimately more powerful than any other action that people can take.”
Consider Orlando who plays the original Julian with polio who is mocked by his classmates prior to the Nazis arriving. “There’s a primal impulse to belittle or marginalize someone else to make ourselves feel more secure,” noted Bomback. His evolving relationship with Arielle proves how erroneous that impulse can be. Later, we observe how the Nazi extermination plans include anyone who they considered genetically inferior.
Bomback explained that the movie’s agenda “isn’t to traumatize the audience. It is to put them in a head space in which they are very aware of the amount of pain and cruelty human beings are capable of but ultimately you can still celebrate the power that kindness has,” he said, adding that kindness is in fact one of the most useful weapons we have at our disposal to combat hatred.
I asked Bomback if he anticipates success for the film at the Box Office. He said after producing such a movie, “success becomes secondary… everything that comes after creating it is a bonus”. Bomback’s father-in-law, notably, was a Holocaust survivor who recently passed away. “I felt some degree of authority and accountability in trying to tell this story.”
More than 20 years ago, longtime Chappaqua resident Michael Shapiro found himself thumbing through a poetry compilation about the Holocaust written from the perspective of Jews in countries such as Greece, Italy and France at at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. The compilation, And The World Stood Silent: Sephardic Poetry of the Holocaust, chronicles the life of nearly 160,000 Sephardic Jews exiled from Spain in 1492 and who ultimately perished in the Holocaust.
