Reeling Backward: Birdy (1984)

Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine give stellar performances as Philly youths torn apart physically and spiritually by war in Alan Parker's unsparing portrait of brotherly affection.

Nicolas Cage and Matthew Modine are now dignified sixtysomething gents, with even the notoriously screwy Cage taking on decidedly less kooky roles than in his youth, like gobbling a live cockroach in 1988’s “Vampire’s Kiss.” So watching them as impossibly fresh-faced youths in Alan Parker’s “Birdy” is almost shocking.

Cage was possibly even more Method for this anti-war drama about two best friends who grow up rough-and-tumble in Philly and are torn apart by Vietnam. To portray the later portion where his character, Al Columbato, has had his face surgically reconstructed with a steel jaw after being blown apart in an explosion, Cage had two of his front teeth pulled. It gives him a vaguely rabbitish, mouth-breather expression.

Makes Brando stuffing his cheeks for “The Godfather” seem like a piker.

Modine plays the title character, whose real name we never learn, a deeply odd youngster obsessed with birds and flight. During their high school days he’s just the local weirdo, protected by tough-guy pal Al, but after the war his wounds are just as deep, but on the inside.

He’s been confined to a military psychiatric hospital, never speaking and barely eating, contorting himself up into bird-like poses and staring off into space like the daffiest of ducks. Though his corporeal wounds were slight, something happened during the month he was MIA in the jungle that made him regress to the days of his youth, when all he wanted to do was stay in his room and study his pet parakeet, Perta, and her offspring.

The resident psychiatrist, Dr./Major Weiss (John Harkins), has Al brought in as a last-ditch effort to snap Birdy out of his fugue. Al has nothing to do while waiting for his bandages to come off, so he can finally see what’s left of his face. Back in high school Al was quite the looker, with soft eyes and a chiseled physique, and part of him fears he won’t be able to make it with the ladies like he used to.

In contrast, Birdy seems to go to the other extreme — not gay, as Al has to repeatedly assure others “we’re not queer for each other or anything” — but entirely asexual. He and Al have an argument about what the big deal with tits is, with Birdy dismissing them as oversized mammary glands like a cow’s, but in a weirder place.

During a prom night parking encounter with Doris (Maud Winchester), the one girl at school who will look his way, Birdy listlessly prods her breasts like a cook poking the meat on the grill to see if it’s done.

However, he does share something far more intimate with Perta, lying naked in his bed while cupping the tiny yellow bird to his mouth, though I’d say it’s more of a spiritual communing than anything akin to bestiality.

Based on the play by William Wharton, the screenplay by Sandy Kroopf and Jack Behr intercuts the framing story of Al visiting Birdy in the hospital with flashbacks to their boyhood antics, the idea being Al is recalling them to stimulate Birdy’s memory.

The hagiographic youthful days take place as rambunctious vignettes of their various adventures and setbacks. They first meet trying to retrieve baseballs hit into Birdy’s parents’ yard, which his strict, surly mother hides rather than giving back to the local kids. His dad is better, a sweet-natured janitor at the highs school, happily shoveling coal into the basement furnace while confiding to his son that his true passion was making things out of wicker, which has fallen out of favor.

“I guess it's hard to be good at something nobody wants, huh?” he shrugs.

Birdy has been fiddling with catching local pigeons and training them to be homing birds, and he and Al go into business with the idea of selling them to local kids. A bird-brained sortie into a no-go construction area — while wearing homemade pigeon suits, no less — ends poorly with Birdy, who becomes increasingly convinced he can fly, with a broken leg and his mother tearing down their pigeon coop.

Next they go in on fixing up a ‘53 Ford Tudor convertible out of the junkyard, though they’re too young to register it. Al’s dad (Sandy Baron), a garbage man in both vocation and disposition, later sells it out from under them after they are arrested for driving it illegally while trying to score with some girls at the carnival. Al is impressed with the way the wallflower Birdy stands up to his old man, demanding the car back, something he could never do.

Later they apprentice with Sargessa the freelance dog catcher, who insists he’s doing a good deed while making a dollar a dog. Turns out he’s selling them to be electrocuted and butchered for pet food, and the boys rebel humorously.

Back at the hospital, not only do Al’s reminisces fail to reach Birdy, the interlude actually seems to be making himself worse. Al grows more and more worried about his face, waking up in night terrors while bunking with the orderly (Bruno Kirby) and taking on a stuttering way of speaking and shambolic walk.

He begins to fret Dr. Weiss will throw him into the head-shrinker hoosegow, too. “I don't trust that guy. Everything's too interesting to him.”

The Irish nurse, Hannah (Karen Young), is the only one Birdy will allow to feed him, and she begins to take on an empathetic tone with Al, too. Though Dr. Weiss grows increasing frustrated with Al’s lack of progress and threatens to send him away.

(This is a bit of a plot hole, since the doctor’s reasoning is that if Al can’t help Birdy, he’ll spend the rest of his life — and probably a short one at that — institutionalized. So… what exactly is the hurry then? Is the doctor eager to consign him to this fate? If so, why bring in Al at all?)

The main reason to watch “Birdy” is the performances of Cage and Modine, who were just 19 and 24 when they shot the movie, respectively. Despite their youth they were already veterans of supporting and even lead roles in films, with Cage breaking out a year earlier in “Valley Girl.”

Cage obviously has the showier part as the motormouth Al, while Modine doesn’t say a word for most of the movie. Heck, he doesn’t even talk that much in the younger sequences. But they make for a classic storytelling pairing, the bossy charismatic one and the gracefully shy one, somewhat akin to George and Lenny from “Of Mice and Men.”

Indeed, there’s some suggestion that Birdy is intellectually stunted, like a gifted child who stopped learning new things around age 10 or so. His obsession with flying becomes increasingly disconnected from reality, even building a da Vinci-like pair of mechanical wings for himself they test out at the junkyard.

He does actually take to the air, or so it seems, if but for a fleeting moment.

Director Parker was just coming off a string of critical and commercial hits — “Midnight Express,” “Fame” and “Pink Floyd — The Wall.” He enlisted Peter Gabriel to provide the score, his first foray into music for movies, and he borrowed heavily from his existing songs as inspiration. The result is a very atypical percussive, electronica-tinged soundscape that is quite evocative.

Released in December 1984 with hopes of chasing awards, “Birdy” was a dismal flop that has largely been forgotten. It certainly deserved better, a sensitive and compelling look at brotherly affection that soars high above its earthbound reception.