Birdy

Birdy (1984) is Alan Parker's war drama, and you can watch it online on iFILM. Two friends from working-class Philadelphia come home from Vietnam wrecked: one with a burned, bandaged face, the other locked inside a military psychiatric ward.

Birdy (Matthew Modine) has been obsessed with flight since boyhood, building wings and raising pigeons. The war silenced him; now he crouches naked by the window and seems to believe he has become a bird. His friend Al (Nicolas Cage) is brought in by the doctors as a last chance to reach the boy he grew up with. The film keeps cutting between their teenage years before the draft and the hospital hush that follows.

Adapted from William Wharton's first novel, Parker's camera soars with the pigeons over the rooftops one moment and sinks into trench mud the next. Peter Gabriel wrote the score. At Cannes in 1985 the film took the Grand Prix of the Jury. Two hours on the idea that war breaks more than bodies. Stream Birdy (1984) online on iFILM.