Dr. Bird's Advice for Sad Poets
Kreate filmsSchooling is rough: the scythe is remorseless as students pass through halls filled with those they love or hate. No in-between, live or die as a social martyr or a reject of popular culture. Those erratic and nonsensical feelings of critical eyes and hollow friendships can be found frequently in Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets. A film which skates around such prominent and touching subjects, never swooping down to a level of understanding as it follows a weak assembly of characters, constructed to highlight the pangs of horror that echo through these corridors. Director Yaniv Raz can merely replicate the façade, though, and brings little to inspire originality.
Awkward moments rattle leading character James Whitman, here played by Lucas Jade Zumann. An inevitable up-and-comer of the industry makes do with a narrative and directing style that shifts between seedy and cringe-inducing moments of romance, to a story driven by similar concepts yet too afraid to touch upon the core of its sentiment. Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets simply has too much to offer, with none of it clicking together as it should. Throwing itself back and forth between time and genre leads to a film too tangled up in its feverish attempts and curating a message out of its prose, but there is little on offer throughout to suggest Raz and his cast have anything much to offer.
Worst of all, though, Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets is oblivious to the effect of pacing. Tonally unaware of its shifting narrative and rushed thoughts, Raz takes cheap comedy and moments of intense imagination, pairing it with brutal and agonising flashbacks to early years in the life of Whitman. Such a jarring response to the story derails it entirely; the film is undecided on what it wants to be. There are sparks and signs of at least four clashing genres in the first few minutes alone, and none of them blend all that well. Struggling under a thick blanket of narrative tangents, Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets is unfocused, channel-surfing his various plot points and attempting to invest time into them all equally. It leads to a half-baked leading narrative; too many supporting leads rely heavily on the imagination of our character. Rather than come across as a unique tool, it has all the hallmarks of a director too afraid to hone in on the reality of his script, which does, to its credit, offer a handful of decent lines and narrative threads.
With a tone, character and style similar to the budding creative found in How to Build a Girl, this film from Yaniv Raz is an optimistic but fractured offering. With flashbacks, narration and fourth-wall breaks that verge on the cusp of annoyance, Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets relies on the charms of leading man Lucas Jade Zunman, and his inevitable rise to the top of Hollywood’s largest and scariest projects. As frustrating and confusing the film may be, there are charms to be found within, however few they may be. Someone should soon advise Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets that it needs to find one key point and stick with it, rather than the erratic and inconsistent approach taken here.