To the non-participant a film about the birding passion seems precarious from the get-go. Fraught with the potential to bore silly, The Big Year manages to keep at a distance most technical aspects of (sorry to get pejorative) “bird-watching.” What results nonetheless leaves one no less abashed than had director David Frankel gone for straight-up National Geographic.
That’s because Jack Black, Steve Martin and Owen Wilson play three rather predictable characters in search of the elusive best-in-the-world-at-what-they-do, which is run around and sight as many avarian species within a calendar year as possible. In between scurrying to airports to sites from the Everglades to the Aleutians, they manage to ignore a beautiful wife (Wison/Rosamund Pike), run a big company (Martin), and struggle with an unappreciative Dad and an overenthusiastic Mom (Black, Brian Dennehy and Diane Weist). We’re supposed to believe at the outset that they are all trying to hide from one another the fact they’re all going for a “Big Year” despite each showing up at the same sighting events. Wilson already holds the world’s record (over 700 species); Pike wants them to work on her fertility. Martin wants to quit as CEO and get with his newborn grandchild. Black, working fulltime, keeps bailing on his boss anytime his ringtone (The Trashmen’s marvelous Surfin’ Bird, of course) beckons him to an imminent sighting.
Everyone’s always leaving foreplay (Wilson), important merger meetings (Martin) or arguments with his Dad (Black) to run to chase the feathered vertebrate. Good scenery abounds, including Pike. The birds look better than in a zoo (though since some are clearly digital, often not as real) but you don’t get to see them for long stretches.
It’s all about the quantity. Or as a British birder in the film quips as he’s pushed aside by an aggressive Wilson, “Only Americans would turn birding into a competition.”
4 light-as-a-feathers out of 10
