Among Ravens

Among Ravens

“Among Ravens” is a great educational film. For those who are interested in history, they will know that the so-called “Generation X” has grown old enough to demand its own version of “The Big Chill”-wannabe “what happened to our values and aspirations?” movie. A lot can also be picked up by bird enthusiasts from Chad, the central character in this film who is a self-proclaimed “nature filmmaker” slightly younger than most of the adults around him and planted into a group of friends downing brews at some prime real estate porn over a July 4 weekend who, when he’s not being kind of Asperger’s-ish (the character’s symptoms, which are depicted as glossy movie generalized tics to begin with, ultimately meant to signal some sort of mystical presence), drops nuggets of science about our feathered brethren that mostly works as metaphor: “if the baby bird is unfeathered you can look for a nest… and if you find it you can bring it home.”

But it does raise some questions. I’m just wondering how at this moment when it seems like all the best directors have given up on features because the process doesn’t allow for their ambition and moved over to TV this pompous, know something-ish, navel gazing, indulgent, pissy, priggish (reasonably well photographed) pile of sick got financed. Because Among Ravens is finally just thoroughly noxious.

The young girl Joey (Johnny Sequoyah, the movie’s best performer) starts off the narration by saying that “Ravens were once among the most colorful of birds.” She thinks of her extended family as raven-like. Her biological dad, a best-selling author named Saul King who calls himself “The King,” titles one of his books “An Unkindness of Ravens.”

So you see, the metaphors start flying fast and furious right away in this picture: we meet schlubby life coach character Calum Grant; his super post hippie dippie teen girlfriend played by Castille Landon (she’s doing a terribly unappealing version of the Meg Tilly character in “The Big Chill”); Joey’s conflicted about being bourgeois mom Wendy (Amy Smart); Wendy’s strapped for income but not wanting to show it husband Ellis (Joshua Leonard), all bantering and trading success stories until oddball Chad (Will McCormack) shows up.

The stranger who upends the lives of complacent characters is a trope with a long history in movies, and as soon as you get a good look at McCormack’s goofy mug, you hope this isn’t going to turn into some kind of “Teorema” style seducing scenario. Thank heavens it does not. Chad shakes things up merely by being inappropriate (so inappropriate that under normal circumstances Ellis would be driving him to the nearest Super 8 about three minutes after he showed up in his dining room), and then being strangely “wise,” like little Joey here. The tyke has her big moment of gravitas when, after her mother describes life as a garden and says sometimes you have to pull out the weeds, she asks, “Who decides what’s a weed?”

Well that’s another good question I suppose; by this point in the film my taxonomy of weeds and ravens and bad actors (the most egregious offender is co-director Russell Friedenberg as the Saul King character; his envy of Justin Theroux’s career is palpable in his every macho sneer) had grown purely academic. I wrote down early in my notes that, unlike “The Big Chill,” this movie does not feature a suicide. Eventually spoiler alert the film proved me wrong on this point. All I can say is I’m glad it wasn’t me, although at some moments there I was getting close.

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