There aren’t very many truly classic Thanksgiving movies in the world. Free Birds won’t change that in the slightest. Jimmy Hayward’s animated feature is about two turkeys who go back in time to prevent their species from becoming a holiday dinner staple. That might sound like a funny concept, but only until you watch it and realize that it’s actually horrifying.
Free Birds tells the story of a group of indigenous American turkeys who, in the present day, are trapped in isolated communities, inbred into stupidity, and whose only hope for survival comes in the form of government handouts. Perhaps you’re beginning to see the problem here. Owen Wilson voices Reggie, a turkey pardoned by the President who then becomes a shiftless layabout addicted to TV and fast food, so complacent that he’s utterly disinterested in helping an activist turkey named Jake, voiced by Woody Harrelson, save their downtrodden kind from the heartless machinations of the Western World.
When Jake and Reggie do finally go back in time to the first Thanksgiving, they discover that turkeys were specifically analogous to the Native American populations who were the eventual victims of genocide and forced relocation. The dopey, pathetic turkeys from the beginning of the film, back in the present day, are therefore an unsettling and mean-spirited caricature of the plight of modern Native American people, presented as proud, intelligent and honorable but only before all the white people showed up. And for some reason we are supposed to laugh at the victims.
Forgiving for the moment that most of the jokes in Free Birds aren’t terribly funny, the ugly context in which the film tries to force itself is too drawn out and unmistakable to make this movie anything but unpleasant. There’s an amusing concept here, one that might work in a half-hour holiday special where there’s not enough time to explore the melancholy metaphor that is technically being presented, but in Free Birds it’s hard to get over the fact that this is actually a terrible tragedy being made fun of by filmmakers who either think it’s fundamentally ridiculous, or have no idea how to take it seriously and entertain at the same time, so they decided to pepper the vileness with constant, insultingly lowbrow humor in order to mask a potentially potent – albeit hardly kid-friendly – allegory for Manifest Destiny.
Free Birds opens with a disclaimer, voiced by George Takei (who also plays the on-board computer of the turkeys’ time machine), explicitly stating that the filmmakers know that their story is problematic. It also claims that the one part of Free Birds that is 100% accurate is the part about the talking turkeys. So it’s basically a “Get Out of Jail Free” card issued by the felons themselves. If Free Birds were a person and told you “Everything I am about to say is inaccurate, fundamentally ignorant and/or at least arguably insensitive to real American history,” I’m pretty sure your reaction shouldn’t be, “Oh, well in that case tell it to my impressionable child.”
The short period in which Free Birds takes place in the present day is loaded with product placement. In particular, the film is so desperate to get Chuck E. Cheese’s brand on camera that it falsely pretends that they deliver; moreover, that they deliver through a completely different restaurant that for no plausible reason also sells their competitor’s pizzas. All of this would seem to warn audiences as early as possible that the following movie will play more like a fiendish ploy for your money than an actually well-made, amusing motion picture. Any heart or (god forbid) soul to be found in Free Birds comes from the talented cast and a few moments of amusing pun-related humor. Every other gag becomes the sad victim of melancholy historical context or the repeated assertion that turkey glutes are inherently funny. Which of course they are not.
It could be argued that I’m thinking too hard about Free Birds. The movie itself simply wasn’t distracting enough to keep my mind from wandering. More to the point, someone should be thinking about these things, and if the filmmakers and/or the studio cannot be bothered, I guess it’s up to us audiences to think for ourselves. I think you shouldn’t see this movie. Free Birds should get stuffed.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
