For the other principals, I was left with the sense that, talented though Andy Jones certainly is, film is not really his medium, although he does well enough. He does a kind of "loaves and fishes" miracle with the material at hand, making a near-banquet out of a box-lunch. So, to a very large degree, the film is carried by the hugely talented and accomplished Hurt. The story-line of "Rare Birds" is slight enough, and the dialogue is a bit wanting. (Interestingly, Hurt and Parker were both in "Sunshine", a Canadian co-production, although they never appear on-screen together.) She and William Hurt generate very good chemistry, and I came away wishing that the film had made much more of them than it did. The love interest in the film, Alice, who is introduced to the married but separated David by Phonse, is played by the talented and lovely Molly Parker ("Sunshine", and the soon to be released "Hoffman"). It's a fragile effort and totally silly, but no-one should really mind seeing Canada's finest portrayed as something like the back-ends of their justly famous steeds for the brief time they're on screen. The local RCMP also get into the picture, doing a sort of Atlantic-coast Keystone Kops routine. There is another sub-plot about a 26-pound cache of cocaine that Phonse has found on the shore, and yet another about a bizarre lighting invention from a Bulgarian scientist who was once Phonse's partner. There are several comic sub-plots in the film, the best of which is Phonse's RSV, the "recreational submarine vehicle" that he has constructed in his shed and which he recruits David to assist him in dive-testing.
(Most Newfoundlanders, and a few others, will know that the Great Auk, the bird for which David's restaurant is named, was hunted to extinction on the Newfoundland coast more than a century ago.) To revive interest in the restaurant, Phonse hatches (almost literally) a scheme to attract bird-watchers to the area by claiming a sighting of a duck long thought to have been extinct - putatively the "rare bird" of the title, although one suspects that the real "rare birds" are Phonse and David themselves. According to David's friend Alphonse (Phonse in the local shorthand, and played by Andy Jones, a Newfoundland writer/actor/comic) it's because David hasn't done a proper marketing job, because certainly he has the gourmet skills, as well as a fabulous wine cellar. John's, the capital city) is going fish-belly up, to coin a phrase. The main plot involves a chef, David (William Hurt), whose haute-cuisine restaurant, The Auk, near Cape Spear (some 8 miles south and east of St. The story is slight, but it more or less works. (In much the same way, one can feel left out in a foreign-language film - including some British films - when those viewers who actually speak the on-screen language are laughing, and one doesn't get the joke.) For some of the laughs, though, you have to know the place and the jargon, and some of the humour might be lost on the average Canadian or American.
I can report, though, that I enjoyed this film, frequently laughing out loud. I'm a Newfoundlander, so of course I enjoyed "Rare Birds"! There aren't that many movies made in, or about, Newfoundland, and when one does appear, I dash off to see it, regardless of the reviews. Reviewed by trendell-1 7 / 10 William Hurt, and Newfoundland, in starring roles When the chickens come home to roost, will Dave and Phonse have a Plan B? Dave is snorting the cocaine and falling for a young visitor who helps him out at the Auk, Phonce is launching his recreational submarine, and various men who don't look like birders are poking about. Soon birders descend from everywhere, and the restaurant is a success.
An odd-duck of a neighbor, Phonce, who has found ten kilos of cocaine and wants Dave's help selling it, contrives to keep Dave in town by faking and reporting the sighting of a rare bird. his restaurant, the Auk, in an out-of-the-way Newfoundland inlet, is a bust a drink is rarely out of reach.