In “The Thing with Feathers,” Benedict Cumberbatch plays a London creator of graphic novels who, quite suddenly, finds himself a widower (his beloved wife collapsed on the kitchen floor and died). In an early scene, we see him try and sustain an atmosphere of everyday normality as he puts breakfast together for his two young sons. But it’s not happening. He feels like he’s juggling four tasks at once; he burns the toast and then frantically tries to scrape off the charred part (a mistake).
The character, who is never named (he’s referred to in the credits as “Dad”), has already shown the depths of his grief, sitting on the couch after the funeral, his tears slowly gushing forth. When Benedict Cumberbatch enacts a moment like this, you can bet that you’re not just seeing an actor cry; you’re seeing him act with every tear. Cumberbatch, in a few moments, expresses the depth of this father’s agony, the terrifying chasm of it.
But that early-morning kitchen episode captures a different aspect of grief. It reminded me of the scene in “Kramer vs. Kramer” where Dustin Hoffman, as a newly separated father now alone with his son, tries to hold it together by making breakfast, which turns into a mini disaster. Part of the power of “Kramer vs. Kramer” is that it understands — more than other divorce movies do — that one of the miseries of a marriage ending is suddenly having to do everything you depended on your spouse for. It’s not that the loss is merely logistical; that, however, is a real part of it. At one point in “The Thing with Feathers,” Cumberbatch says that he relied on his wife for…everything. For a while, I had hopes that the movie, with a lacerating intimacy, would dramatize how insanely overwhelming the life of a widower like this one might be — emotionally, spiritually, practically.
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What I wasn’t counting on was the things with feathers. It starts off as a bird — a crow, to be precise, which imposes itself on the audience in closeup shock cuts of beak and wings, like something out of a horror film. It makes sense, in a way, to say that the sudden loss of a spouse could summon a primal feeling of horror. Yet in “The Thing with Feathers,” we’re a bit surprised to see this expressed through randomly staged jump scares. Why is this crow hovering around anyway?
Actually, it’s more than a crow. It’s a character — or the herald of one. For just as Cumberbatch and his two boys, who are also never named (yes, it’s that kind of movie), are contending with this intrusive, cawing, wing-shuffling feathered foe, there’s an even more majestic menace on hand: an eight-foot tall giant crow, known as…Crow, who speaks, courtesy of the actor David Thewlis, in a voice of sinister British portent, as if he were the Scarecrow of Romney Marsh crossed with Edgar Allen Poe’s Raven saying “Nevermore!” He says things like “Good morning, English widower! Sleep well, did we?” At first, he appears to be there to harass and terrorize Cumberbatch, or maybe to act as an embodiment of his fears.
And he is indeed kind of a projection: of the woe and alienation Cumberbatch is feeling. For Cumberbatch, trapped in the muck of his pain, is employing art as his way out. Seated in his home studio, he uses black ink to draw elaborate pictures (of a crow) that look like they came out of a gothic nightmare. They will be the illustrations of his new graphic novel. So is he dreaming all this up? Maybe, but Crow is quite literally there: a menacing big bird who has come into the room to interface with Cumberbatch, to be his supernatural playmate and philosopher and tough-love therapist. This demon bird may look intimidating, but he is there to heal.
There’s a bit of tony pretense involved. A Wikipedia entry informs me that Crow “is the Crow from Ted Hughes’ 1970 poetry book.” Well! It still looks like something out of a megaplex fright flick. “The Thing with Fathers” is a getting-over-grief movie that strands itself in a netherworld between psychological drama and “dark” fantasy. Written and directed by Dylan Southern, who based it on Max Porter’s 2015 novella “Grief is the Things with Feathers,” the film is quite taken with its own ambition, which it signifies visually, with a nearly square aspect ratio and images of burnished gloom. But the whole thing is oppressive and, in an odd way, not very interesting.
Crow never becomes a gripping character; he’s too sternly abstract, too hectoring, too much of a visual effect in search of a personality. And his big lesson, while unassailable, is not exactly the stuff of revelation. It seems that the film wants to preach a message about the distinction between grief and despair. Grief, it suggests, is good, despair not so much. Anyone who has suffered a tragedy needs to grieve, to confront and deal with it — but there’s a difference between honest grieving and wallowing in your pain. Easier said than done, perhaps, but for a drama about grief this plays like something out of Mental Health 101.
Cumberbatch, of course, has to go too far — into wallowing — or there wouldn’t be a movie. He needs to dance like a madman at midnight while drunk as a skunk on whiskey. The actor colors in many moments with honest feeling, but he has no one to play off. The film so fails to characterize the two boys (who are portrayed by lookalike brothers, Richard and Henry Boxall) that it barely distinguishes between them. And that relationship, between a father and his sons as they negotiate their new life and attempt to wriggle out of the claws of the despair demon, should have been central. Instead, we’re stuck with a solitary character locked in a ritualized interface with his ominous feathered friend. Which turns out to be a rather bird-brained idea.