Alexandre Moors “The Yellow Birds” premiered at Sundance in 2017 and received a limited theatrical and video-on-demand release the following year. The film also won the Special Jury Award for cinematography at the festival, and its easy to see why. “The Yellow Birds” is a haunting look at a never-ending war in a desolate landscape starring Tye Sheridan and Alden Ehrenreich. Both actors give tremendous performances, playing young men whose spirits are crushed by the endless violence and cruelty theyre subjected to by the US Army.
Like the lyrical, poetic novel on which its based, “The Yellow Birds” tells its story via a series of flashbacks, constantly cutting back and forth across several timelines. This occasionally makes the film difficult to follow, especially as the plot moves into its endgame, which explains an event that happened earlier in the narrative.
Further, the film raises complicated questions about truth and memory, specifically the fallibility of both as they relate to trauma. Who gets to decide what the “truth” is when everyone involved has personally suffered? Must we remember things as they actually happened, or is there space to choose our own recollections of events? And how does the films ending explore these themes while also revealing what happened to poor Murph?
Daniel “Murph” Murphy Quotes in The Yellow BirdsThe The Yellow Birds quotes below are all either spoken by Daniel “Murph” Murphy or refer to Daniel “Murph” Murphy. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
A yellow bird perched on my windowsill had a yellow bill. I used a piece of bread to entice it in, and then I smashed his fucking head.
Neither my name nor Murph’s was present on any of the bullets. There were no bombs made just for us. If any of them had killed the owners of those names, they would have killed us too. There was no set time or location for us. Unwaveringly, I think that the filthy knives that stabbed Murph were addressed “To whom it may concern” at the time of his death. ” Nothing made us special. Not living. Not dying.
Our lives had been small, filled with little dreams and a yearning for something bigger than dirt roads. We would then arrive here, where people would tell us who to be and life wouldn’t need to be explained. After completing our work, we fell asleep peacefully and guilt-free.
Since all memories are assignations of significance and no one else—possibly not even me—would ever know what happened to him, I felt obligated to remember him accurately. I haven’t made any progress, really. When I try to get it right, I can’t. I try to forget it, but it just comes back stronger and faster. No peace. So what. I’ve earned it.
However, events transpired as they did regardless of our wish for a different course of events. It really was that easy, in spite of my long-standing tendency to explain things more deeply and profoundly, something that would seem to match the degree of perplexity I was experiencing.
“I was really happy it wasn’t me. That’s crazy, right?”
“Naw. You know what’s crazy? Not thinking that shit.”
Since it is impossible to pinpoint the exact cause of anything, I started to view the war as a farce, despite how brutal it was and how much I wanted to quantify the specifics of Murph’s strange new behavior and link it to a single instance, incident, or offense that I would not be held accountable for.
He wanted to choose. He wanted to want. His desire was to substitute anything else for the ennui that was consuming him. He desired to choose the objects he would surround himself with, rejecting anything that happened to fall upon him by accident or happenstance and remain in orbit like an accretion disk. In order to counterbalance the broken remains of everything he hadn’t asked for, he wanted one memory that he had made of his own free will.
It probably wouldn’t matter what our level of culpability was. I could feel it in my cells; I was guilty of something, that much was certain.
What you need to remember about the plot of The Yellow Birds
At basic training, Murph (Tye Sheridan) and Bartle (Alden Ehrenreich) cross paths. Both of them are skilled shooters, and they quickly become friends—especially after Sergeant Sterling (Jack Huston) mentors them both. Maureen, played by Jennifer Aniston, Murph’s mother, promises Bartle that she will take care of her son at a party for military families. She also asks Bartle to be the one to inform Maureen if something were to happen to Murph.
The boys in Iraq crumble under the weight of the conflict. Murph falls in love with Jenny (Carrie Alexander), a medic, but he’s too shy to ask her to dance at the base’s Christmas party. As his troops advance, Sterling starts to lose it, killing people in a car and salting the land. As a firefight breaks out and one of his fellow soldiers is killed, Bartle nods off while standing. Murph starts to crumble, too. When a bomb blows up the car he’s driving, he gets hurt, and Jenny gets hurt in an attack on the base while she’s tending to him.
When Bartle gets home in the present, his mother (Toni Collette) is troubled by her son’s hollowed-out shell. After learning that Murph is missing from a news broadcast, Maureen makes an attempt to see Bartle. He runs away from home and sleeps under a bridge. Bartle is taken in by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, which is looking into Murph’s case, after he almost drowns.
How does the end play into The Yellow Birds’ title?
There are several reasons why the film “The Yellow Birds” is named so, and when considered collectively, they provide a metaphor that helps us comprehend the characters in the film. The film explores the horrific effects of war and the transience of truth. A group of recruits perform a traditional Army cadence about a yellow bird at the start of the film. Even if they don’t make it to the end, the first verse frequently ends, “I smashed his little head after luring him in with a piece of bread.” It’s a rhyme about discovering something lovely and crushing it for the cruel, base enjoyment of it. There is a correlation between that and how the military deprives its soldiers of all emotional intelligence.
Furthermore, Maureen is informed by Bartles’ mother that the notion that a baby bird will reject its toucher is untrue. This is relevant toward the end of the movie when Maureen, inconsolable, finds out that Bartle chose to conceal Murph’s body. He tells her, “I didn’t want you to remember him like I do.” She replies, “Thats not your decision to make. To put it another way, this mother bird would never have turned away her young. The title, then, refers to the unwavering love that military families have for one another despite the horrors of war changing their children forever.
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