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The Thing With Feathers Almost Wastes a Great Benedict Cumberbatch Performance
The actor is at his best, most alive and inventive here. But The Thing With Feathers doesn’t know what kind of movie to be.
A comic book artist with charcoal drawings and figures of birds around his house, he begins having visions of a giant, talking crow who seizes control of his body and profanely mocks his melancholy. A talented guy with a seductive voice and wonderfully dissonant face, the actor has sometimes struggled to find the right parts: His demeanor tempts people into casting him as oddballs, but really, he’s at his best when he’s playing confused, ordinary men. Porter’s title, of course, is an allusion to Emily Dickinson’s poem “’Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers.” Introducing his film at Sundance, Southern said that he changed his protagonist’s profession because academia didn’t seem very cinematic, and also because he really liked graphic novels.
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