“Sometimes things just happen. Nothing you can do about it.” So explains Richard (John Slattery) to his 17-year-old daughter, Paula (Emily Meade), after an unfortunate accident brings trouble to their family. They live in a small, wintry logging town in Maine, which serves as fitting background to their stark, hard situation.
If Richard’s feeble proverb makes him sound cold, his wife Lesley (Amy Morton) is warmer. A local school bus driver, her caring nature is apparent from the start of Bluebird, when she offers the wool cap off her own head to a disembarking child who has forgotten his. Making her way toward the back of the bus during her routine, end-of-day check, collecting trash and left-behind items, her attention is unexpectedly drawn back to the front when a bluebird flies in through the open door. She moves to chase it away and so never completes her check.
It isn’t until the next morning when she’s returned to the bus for her morning route that she catches sight of a young boy’s boot perched on a back seat: Owen (Quinn Bard) had fallen asleep on the ride home the day before and was left on the bus overnight in ten-below temperatures. Profoundly hypothermic, he is rushed to the hospital where it is uncertain if he will recover.
Much of what follows in Lance Edmand’s debut film has to do with assigning responsibility for Owen’s injuries, but this proves to be complicated. Lesley’s failure to follow procedure and complete the bus check seems to leave her criminally negligent. On the other hand, Owen’s hard-living mother Marla (Louisa Krause) forgot it was her day to have her son, and so didn’t even notice his absence. Unable to reach her daughter, Owen’s grandmother, Crystal (Margo Martindale), with whom he usually lives, unaccountably assumes the habitually unreliable Marla has met Owen at the bus and the two are having a nice time together.
Morally, Marla and Crystal’s failures might alleviate some of Lesley’s responsibility, but it does nothing for her sense of guilt, the effect of which is crushing. Ever self-sacrificing, she is a peacemaker, the one who makes things right, as when she offers the boy her hat at film’s start. She works to ease the strain between her husband and daughter, alternately excusing or ignoring the bad behavior of both. Now she has brought stress, shame, and financial hardship to the family.
To its credit, the circumstantial outcomes are not the primary focus of Bluebird. The film isn’t actually concerned with whether or not Lesley will be called to account for her actions legally, if she will be sued for what little she has, or even with answering the question of Owen’s fate. Rather, the issue at the center of the film is emotional distraction. It is perhaps a bit heavy-handed at times with the bluebirds-as-symbols (in addition to the bus, Lesley repeatedly hears and sees them at critical moments), but, overall, it is an effective and thoughtful examination.
Is distraction something that “just happens”, as Richard proposes? Maybe. The bluebird on the bus is random enough. In a poorly considered attempt to connect with Marla, mom to mom, Lesley recounts a time when the family went ice fishing and she became distracted by the sunset, not noticing her daughter, then five, had fallen through the ice and nearly died. She vowed never to take her eyes off her again.
The problem is, Lesley manages to “keep her eyes on her” daughter (and husband) without really seeing them. In this way, though she performs the actions of the quintessential “good mother” — fixing dinner, doing laundry, working hard — she is more like “bad mother” Marla than she thinks. Marla keeps herself distracted with drugs, booze, and men to the point she “can’t keep track of every little thing” (like whether or not it’s her day to take care of Owen), in order to forget what having a child has cost her.
Lesley keeps her interactions with her family shallow, performing tasks. So, when Richard comes in late from work, she doesn’t question him (though Paula hints she should). She does comment, however, “I can smell the cold on you.” The remark seems colloquial at first, until it is revealed he has a history she’s purposely ignoring.
All of this takes place in a rural, financially depressed town that seems to have missed the digital age altogether. The only cell phone to appear is turned off; houses have wall phones, with cords; kids kill time with snowmobiling, setting off fireworks, and making out instead of using Snapchat and Kik. Still, this distinctly un-technical setting emphasizes, almost allegorically, our own distractedness. Every character in Bluebird reminds us of how we might deliberately distract ourselves, in ways that simultaneously buffer and generate pain, and also, prevent meaningful connection with the people around us.