Blue Heron

Synopsis:  A young girl tries to understand her brother’s behavioral problems while acclimating to the family’s move.

Even with the best of circumstances, it’s not easy being a little kid. Adolescence has its own problems with hormones and whiplash moods, but at least you have some idea of what’s up. Remember being a little kid and trying to figure out how the world works? So much brainwork and so much wondering if you figured things out right.

A child’s brain is growing fast, making neural connections, which is hard to believe if you’ve been a recess monitor for a bunch of four and five-year-olds. Misinformation is rife on the playground. “Bees chase you because they’re mad.” “The baby in my mom’s belly eats cookies because babies like that.” “My cousin went to the moon.”

In Blue Heron, eight-year-old Sasha (Eylul Beddoes) is trying to figure out her family, especially her teen brother Jeremy. It’s the mid-nineties and the family has just moved to Vancouver Island, Canada. The parents (Iringó Réti and Ádám Tompa) are Hungarian immigrants. The kids, including Felix (Preston Drabble) and Henry (Lian Serg), speak English with Canadian accents, so it seems that only Jeremy spent his early years in Hungary.

It’s summer vacation and Sasha seems eager to meet the neighborhood kids before school starts. When she gets invited to a local girl’s house, she’s quiet. Later, she asks her mom if she can have friends over, but the mom says it wouldn’t be a good idea. (Jeremy is prone to reckless behavior and doesn’t listen to his parents.) Sasha listens in to her parents’ conversations about what the family therapist has said. The parents just chuckle wearily listening to a recording of the therapist advising that they need to show Jeremy who is boss. Jeremy doesn’t care about curfews or consequences.

One day the mom offers to take the kids to the beach so that the dad can work on figuring out their 90’s computer. At first, I thought it was for his work, but he seemed really happily preoccupied, so I’m guessing it was a game. Maybe Myst, an early fantasy game that could well keep dad occupied all summer while the kids run amok.

The mom pleads with Jeremy to get in the car with his younger siblings, but he keeps thwonking a ball against an outside wall of the house. Maybe he wants to drive the dad mad or maybe he has a hearing problem. Finally, he gets in the car. When they get to the beach Jeremy bounds from Sasha making a sand castle to climbing a short cliffside where he enthusiastically heaves big rocks into the water. His little brothers are beside him, enjoying the diversion. I thought, Don’t get too comfortable. Jeremy might toss one of you next.

Sasha is watchful. In one of the parent conversations, we’ve heard that Jeremy can be sweet or nasty with the sibs. Jeremy’s activities include lying on front steps, refusing to come in (Sasha steps over him), walking around on roof, refusing to come down (mother pleads with him), stealing and getting into scraps. Before the family has even settled in, the po-po have been around.

Sasha often plays quietly by herself or watches TV with her brothers. At one point, when mom and Sasha are spending time together, the mom asks her daughter what she thinks about Jeremy’s behavior. Sasha says, I don’t know. I think she was just wanting to hear how her daughter is feeling. Of course, she is too young to make sense of it.

Occurrences like Jeremy going missing and her mom desperately driving around looking for him with the kids in the car? This is just how things are. The kids make the best of it by counting as high as they can 751! 752! 753! I felt like singing would be something less likely to frazzle the mom’s nerves and send her driving into a ditch. I bet the mom was trying to put herself into Jeremy’s mindset to figure out where he was; maybe throwing lit firecrackers in a big parking lot or smashing the local school’s windows.

I wished that Sasha could spend her summer doing normal 90’s kid stuff like making friendship bracelets, and watching Nickelodeon’s golden age shows instead of being front row for Jeremy’s latest escapades/misdemeanors. I wondered if she’d feel safe bringing a Tamagotchi digital pet home or might Jeremy pawn it.

I wondered about Jeremy’s diagnosis. Jeremy’s parents have been reaching out for support and guidance. But this is the 90’s and maybe diagnosis and suggested treatment of things like Oppositional Defiant Disorder wasn’t too far along. (If that’s what he had.) The field of childhood psychiatry got a late start relative to adult studies.

I looked up what happened to minors with developmental delays and neurological dysfunction in olden times and was dismayed to learn that they were tossed into insane asylums with adults. Even the people who were trying to improve living conditions were uninformed as to what caused the dysfunctions in the first place. Phrases like ‘moral failure’ were common.

Take this as an example… in the early 1800’s Dr. Johan Guggenbuhl wrote that he was moved to dedicate his life to curing ‘cretinism’ after being moved by the sight of a young person who was ‘a dwarfed, crippled cretin of stupid appearance mumbling the Lord’s Prayer at a wayside cross.’ Very sad. But this is late 20^th Century Canada, surely Jeremy can be helped?

Blue Heron is well-served by writer-director Sophy Romvari’s life experience. She loosely based the story on her own family’s experience. It’s easy to see how a child who is a domestic abuse victim can develop behavioral pathologies, but that doesn’t apply here. The parents talk to a social worker and confide their worries that he will make good on his occasional threats and end up hurting someone in the family – intentionally or not.

The film zips forward to an adult Sasha (Amy Zimmer) and a film she is making about her family. She gathers social workers and asks questions about treatment and support for families today. The people are actual social workers and they have knowledgeable insights. I felt kind of badly for them though, because while they are educated and caring, trying to determine what is going on in a person’s brain at any given time is very difficult. In fact, adult Sasha quotes teen Jeremy remarking that he doesn’t know why he does what he does.

Adult Sasha is still trying to figure out Jeremy and her family in phone calls with her mom and on beach walks with her dachshund doggo. Without knowing it, she’s not alone.

I thought of the nature documentary that Jeremy was watching as a teen… over footage of Blue Heron’s in the wild the narrator discusses how the parental bond breaks down and the young are left on their own. But, based on my bird nerd knowledge, that would be after the parents observe that the young are fishing successfully on their own. It’s also confirmed by the young coming over to beg for food less and less.

Of course, the filmmaker isn’t literally comparing Jeremy and his family to Blue Herons. But the family bonds are under tremendous strain when parenting doesn’t result in offspring handling life and they put themselves and others in danger. Something we’re guessing that doesn’t afflict heron families.

I thought of my relative who worked with a broad spectrum of people in residence (full-time care in state facilities). He said that the residents, who had diagnoses of developmental disabilities that resulted in behavioral management issues, often came to the facility after a suicide attempt of an immediate family member.

Sasha, and by extension, writer-director Sophy Romvari, are representative of the persistent stress on the family when a child is chronically in crisis. While the parents can actually make attempts to better the situation, the siblings are helpless observers.

The movie isn’t relentlessly downbeat because it shows that support is available to ameliorate and intervene for kids in crisis and their families, even if the family member in question is not cured.

Whenever I’ve seen a Great Blue Heron  they are not with a flock but standing alone in shallow water fishing. They are very patient. When they have chicks (2 – 5 each season), both the mom and dad work tirelessly during daylight hours bringing food to the young and guarding the nest. The babies fledge (first flight) at about two months. They remain close to the parents for another month or so. It’s hard to imagine how they can be so patient fishing while human toddlers are on the go getting into everything.

Even though we humans have our precious smart phones and delicacies like Pop Tarts, watching a heron take flight, it seems they live their precious lives with fewer complications.

There is a Native American tale (from the Hitchiti tribe) of a heron and a hummingbird, in which the two birds agree to a race and whoever wins will have rights to the water. It’s sort of a tortoise and hare story because the hummingbird is very fast but stops often, whilst the heron is slow and steady. The heron wins and tells the hummingbird that herons now have the water while the hummingbirds will drink from the flowers. That is a good story, right? And I bet that children all around the world would love it and telling each other this worthwhile cultural tale is a good diversion from the usual fantastical stuff they tell each other about day-to-day life.

Movie Loon Movie Review Shortcut:

Grade:  A-

Cut to the Chase:  A family in crisis and how the children are effected is applicable to many people. Blue Heron has no easy answers, but the movie brings attention to the support needed for all of the kids in a family when a sibling has needs that frequently upend family life. Eylul Guven as young Sasha is particularly good.

Humor Highlight: The lengths to which Jeremy will go for a Slurpee (a sweet icy drink)