Helen Mirren, Gillian Anderson in ‘Wonder’ Sequel

Some of the most compelling moments in White Bird, Marc Forster’s mostly slushy adaptation of R.J. Palacio’s graphic novel of the same name, take place during flashbacks to the 1940s. These are the recollections of an aging grandmother trying to teach her grandson lessons about kindness. They’re also stories of survival, and Forster, with DP Matthias Königswieser, films them in a way that avoids the trappings of sentimentality.

In them, the German-Swiss helmer behind Monster’s Ball, Quantum of Solace and more recently A Man Called Otto reaches for a specificity and a clear-eyed honesty that liberates parts of this young adult film from narrative contrivance. Unfortunately, too much of the rest of Mark Bomback’s screenplay tends toward saccharine manipulation.

White Bird functions as both a prequel and a sequel to Wonder, another Palacio work adapted for the big screen. That story followed Auggie Pullman, a 10-year-old boy with Treacher Collins syndrome who is tormented by kids at school, including the wealthy Julian (Bryce Gheisar). This one opens a few years later with Julian, slightly older but still played by Gheisar, starting his first day at a new school. It’s an opportunity for Julian to remake himself and shed his unsavory past, and he’s decided the best course of action is to stay under the radar. When a classmate (Priya Ghotane) invites Julian to join the vaguely named Social Justice Club, the teenager, perpetually hidden under his hoodie, declines. 

Later that evening, Julian explains his plan to his grandmother, Sara (Helen Mirren), a sophisticated woman who has traveled from Paris to New York for the opening of her retrospective at the Met. (She humorously deems the honor an institution’s way of apologizing to older artists they have either forgotten or altogether neglected.) As Sara guides Julian to the dining room for dinner, she expresses disappointment — she doesn’t believe becoming a wallflower is the correct course of action for someone once suspended for bullying. Over a meal whose intimacy is signaled through warm lighting and close-up angles, Sara shares the tale of her childhood and how the compassion and courage of one boy saved her life. 

White Bird then jumps back to the fall of 1942, where a young Sara (Ariella Glaser) enjoys what her older self now describes as a relatively spoiled youth in small-town France. She spends her days at school, drawing intricate doodles and crushing on Vincent (Jem Matthews), a popular boy. Though news of Nazi invasions dominate the news, occupation feels to the young girl like a distant issue unlikely to reach her corner of the world.

But then Sara’s reality changes, slowly at first and then more dramatically. Shops she once frequented now have signs saying they do not serve Jewish people. Those she called friends treat her with an uncharacteristic frostiness. In heated late-night conversations, her parents, Max (Ishai Golan) and Rose (Olivia Ross), argue about whether or not to leave their town.

The Nazi influence and presence in the area becomes still more apparent as the roundups begin, with soldiers barge into homes, offices and schools making violent arrests. Sara only narrowly escapes a frightening incursion at her own institution with the help of Julien (Orlando Schwerdt), a quiet boy left disabled by polio. He leads her through an underground labyrinth to the barn where she’ll live for years, gradually becoming part of his family. Julian’s mother Vivienne (Gillian Anderson) takes special care of Sara, keeping her fed, making her clothes and fiercely protecting her from the gaze of nosy neighbors who might be Nazi informants. 

Forster’s steady direction keeps this thread of White Bird affecting even when it conforms to predictable narrative beats. Glaser and Schwerdt are a charismatic duo, and the specificity of the details about the constrictions of the Nazi state make their friendship more tactile and raises the movie’s stakes. It’s easy to believe that these children care for one other and that their interactions — whether in real life or in the cocoon of their imaginative play — deepen their understanding of each other and the world. 

The same can’t be said for the flimsy framing narrative about the connection between an older Sara and her grandson. These scenes struggle to shake off the stiffness of vague platitudes and shallow character development. Whenever White Bird leaves a young Sara and Julien, whether to consider the changing sociopolitical landscape of Nazi-occupied France or to return to the present day, it loses its magic.

That Julien’s meant to extract only lessons about kindness works less well here than in Wonder. If he were to become passionate for a particular cause, rather than just being asked to attend the blandly named Social Justice Club, the messages of White Bird might stick better and feel less manipulative. Instead, audiences are left with Sara’s contextless invocation of Martin Luther King Jr. — a figure whose quotes have been so watered down by general application that the force of their meaning, much like Sara’s story, is always at risk of being lost.