Birdy - or: What Happens When the Psychological Effects of War Strike Someone Who's Already Sort of Crazy?

So here we are: the end of 1984 (as it applies to the filmography of Nicolas Cage).

Birdy is about... well, a lot of things, really.

It's about friendship, being misunderstood, the Vietnam War, mental illness (though this is much more subtext than anything else), the tole of combat... and birds. Obviously.

The movie follows, through a series of flashbacks and disjointed timelines, the friendship of Al Columbato (played by Our Hero) and "Birdy" - his weird friend who descends from an affinity for, to an obsession with, birds, played by Matthew Modine.

When Al and Birdy meet, the latter is, or at least seems like, what you'd call simply a bird lover.

But the normal kind. This... changes... later.

His fascination with birds becomes an obsession, an eventually all-consuming one, to the point where it drives a wedge between him and Al, just before they ship out, having been drafted to serve in Vietnam.

An experience that, not uniquely, screws them up. In different ways.

When they both come back, having been discharged due to injuries, they're suffering, but in different ways, and maybe not even in the ways that they seem to be. Al's face has been badly burned by an explosion, and Birdy hasn't spoken since he came back, after being MIA for a month following a helicopter crash and a napalm attack.

Al is brought in to see if he can help bring his friend back to the 'real world' - to the surprise of very few on this side of the fourth wall, Birdy has now well and truly taken up residence in his bird-brain.

The question that I had by the end was whether it really was Birdy who was psychologically traumatized by the war, or whether his retreat into bird-dom was tactical, and salvatory...

The movie is poignant enough to get through the quite silly bits without finding them too silly, and well-written enough that you do tend to believe that: A) Al really is trying to stay friends with a guy who thinks he's a bird, and B) Birdy is a guy who thinks he's a bird.

Yes, there are silly parts. Yes, that's Matthew Modine and Nic Cage wearing pigeon suits.

Also, Nic Cage gets into a few fights, and (assuming that groin-kicking an extra doesn't count as a 'stunt' and it's really him) even gets to work with the most (apparently) trusting aspiring actor in Hollywood:

I quite enjoyed this movie.

And following the recently established tradition, here it is in one-pixel slices: