Over the Top Birdy

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Fish gotta swim, Birdy gotta fly, and his best friend Al gotta love this weirdo--if not till he die, then at least until he is lured out of the catatonic state in which Alan Parker's delirious and challenging movie discovers him.

The immediate cause of Birdy's sorry condition, in a prison-like veterans hospital, was his traumatizing experience in Viet Nam, which was not gentle on Al either. But Al's wounds are merely physical, and his plastic surgery seems to be healing nicely. Birdy's case is altogether more desperate, and the main business of the film is to explore its roots. A sociologist might point to the usual downers: poverty, loneliness and lovelessness. But that would reckon without Birdy's mysterious singularity, expressed in his obsession with the avian world.

We are not talking about an ordinary adolescent escape route here, something like the stamp collection or the drum set preordained for the parental attic. We are talking about a lad who would, if he could, become a bird. We are talking about an adolescent making a bird suit pasted together feather by feather and then launching himself off roofs and cliffs in an attempt to fly. And we are talking about a madness that is innocent, joyous and, finally, perhaps unconquerable and exemplary. Especially as it is presented by Matthew Modine in a brave performance--just over the top but under control--with Nicolas Cage playing sane and sensible counterpoint as Al. In movies ! like Midnight Express and Fame, Director Parker oversentimentalized innocence and oversensationalized the cruelty of the world that oppresses it. Not so in Birdy. Working from a lively adaptation of William Wharton's admired 1978 novel, he has achieved his personal best. He has turned an ordinarily bleak Philadelphia location into something akin to the Prince of Darkness's castle. He has made his principal character, who might have been just another teen angel, into a complex figure, comical and a little dangerous. He has, finally, transcended realism without traducing it. His movie does what Birdy himself can never quite manage. It defies gravity, convention and category, and gets away with it.