The coming-of-age drama Little Wing opens with two facts, both quoted from the 2006 New Yorker article of the same name by Susan Orlean. The first: “Americans move, on average, every five years; pigeons almost never move.” The second: that racing pigeons “have a fixed, profound and nearly incontrovertible sense of home”.
The title card successfully imparts a few facts about the film, which premieres this week on the streaming service Paramount+. One, that Little Wing, directed by Dean Israelite from a screenplay by John Gatins, will awkwardly interweave human concerns with the very different realities of pigeons, who are indeed fascinating and the best thing about this movie. And that the film will attempt to vest such comparisons with certain deep insights about our sense of belonging and home.
I’d rather keep the focus on the pigeons, who have the ability, as stated several times in Little Wing, to navigate their way back to their specific roost no matter how far away they’ve traveled or how long they’ve been gone. There are accounts of racing pigeons returning home a full 10 years after their departure. No one fully knows how they do this, but they do. Racing pigeons are, I’m now convinced, very cool.
The same cannot be said for Kaitlyn (The Florida Project’s child star Brooklynn Prince), an eighth-grader in Portland, Oregon, with a near-terminal condition of teenage angst and a bad case of voiceover. Kaitlyn’s parents have recently divorced, and her police detective mom (Yellowstone’s Kelly Reilly) is looking to sell their family home, as she can’t make the mortgage payments alone. Her older brother Matt (Simon Khan) has stopped speaking. She is not invested at school and only has one friend, Adam (Che Tafari), who has complicated things by maybe being in love with her. She’s into Bikini Kill, which feels like a middle-aged man’s way of conveying that she’s alternative for gen Z.
All of this would be and is difficult for a 13-year-old girl, and Kaitlyn is understandably frustrated. Unfortunately, Gatins’s script and Prince’s performance portray Kaitlyn as less troubled yet sympathetic coming-of-age hero and more self-righteous, self-absorbed teenage nightmare. Teenage protagonists do not need to be likable, but if they are the focus for 100 minutes, you do need to root for their hare-brained schemes, and Kat’s ideas feel neither organic nor root-able; gifted two racing pigeons by a family friend, she decides that the best way to get a quick $100k to save the house would be to steal the Granger, a prized racing pigeon worth $120k, from renowned pigeon breeder Jaan (Succession’s Brian Cox, woefully misplaced in this story that looks and feels like stereotypical streaming service churn). She then sells it to the “Russian Pigeon Mafia”. The theft lands her in hot water with a furious Jaan and poor, perpetually supportive Adam with a broken arm.
Though marketed as a “coming of age drama”, Israelite styles much of the film, particularly the first half, as a bad suspense thriller, complete with an ominous score. Adding to the tonal confusion is Prince’s generally flat affect of teenage discontent, choppy editing and Cox basically played a watered-down version of Logan Roy for what is supposed to be the central relationship of the movie, as Jaan and Kat go from mutually suspicious enemies to co-conspirators and pigeon hobbyists. (Instead of “fuck off,” it’s “go away!” and “you surly little cretin!”) Also, jaunty montages of pigeons and pigeon facts (cool) spliced with jarring conversations about Kat’s suicidal ideation and Jaan’s experience with death as a soldier in Vietnam (too keyed up to convince). The two do eventually become friends, but the journey is so oddly paced and portrayed that such a development has very little payoff.
Little Wing is overall an odd, unaffecting mess, other than, again, the pigeons, who look majestic on camera. Besides an overly serious Cox, there’s little to distinguish it from the many throwaway titles unceremoniously released on streaming services, although unceremonious may be fair in this case. Learning about the jewel that is the racing pigeon with an incontrovertible sense of home is a treat, but there’s not much else to find here.
Little Wing is now available on Paramount+
