I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story
Directors: Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker
(iTunes)
B+
Icons come in many sizes. Some pound slabs a beef while training to the score of Bill Conti. A popular few dwell within mechanized suits and hurl star-spangled shields at the heads of intergalactic criminals. However, only one staple of American pop culture is soft-spoken, yellow and feathered. Dave LaMattina and Chad Walker’s I Am Big Bird: The Caroll Spinney Story explores the man behind Sesame Street’s longest-legged resident. Not unlike 2011’s Being Elmo, I Am Big Bird explores the pitfalls and triumphs of the professional puppeteer. In doing so, the unseen artists at the butt of every joke humble us, proving that something goofy can beget the extraordinary.
LaMattina and Walker take a sporadic approach to tracing the ascent of Spinney as both Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. Though the film’s opening moments center mostly on the performer’s childhood, it is done so with haste. Later, the more traumatic moments of his life are woven into the much more chronologically correct tale of Spinney’s most famous character. Interviews with the puppeteer, his family, Frank Oz, Emilio Delgado, Matt Vogel, and numerous others serve as a buffer to this celebration of life. The film even goes a few steps further, taking precious time to examine the global political climate and the changing nature of media throughout the last three decades.
It explores a rarely considered sense of importance in Jim Henson’s classic television program. Likewise, its use of archival footage helps frame Spinney’s work within a larger cultural portrait. The filmmakers do well to let certain iconic images be, like Big Bird’s reconciliation with the death of an older cast member, compounded exponentially with the character’s musical epitaph at Henson’s memorial. Animated interludes remind us of the playful nature of the subject, but they do so in a way that never compromises the work’s sincerity.
A theme of dedication reoccurs heavily throughout, echoing contemporary docs like Man on Wire and Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Character studies typically focus on, well, characters, so it’s difficult to explore anything else without feeling tangential. But I Am Big Bird keeps its frequent off-topic discussions relevant, maintaining a resolute pace for an hour and a half that almost feels momentary. Not that it goes by too fast to sink into, but there are few of those precious ambient moments from which many documentaries benefit. Still, there’s a general accessibility to be cherished here, even sans extensive reflection.
I Am Big Bird isn’t exactly a documentary for children, despite its subject matter. Conversations of Spinney’s multiple bouts with depression, as well as his trials with abuse and ridicule, are tough to swallow, yet they make an already-lovable guy even more so. Anecdotes of his career aim straight for the soul, while others (like his last-minute absence aboard the Challenger space shuttle) reflect on mortality. I Am Big Bird showcases the life of a performer, mentor, and profoundly influential individual — an individual to whom we are inadvertently oblivious, even if his character’s so familiar.
