DN:FILM For the Birds

Kathy Murphy has a blowzy goose nest of hair, a mouth of missing and jumbled teeth and the endearingly eccentric air of a crazy aunt, with twitchy glints of Gena Rowlands in “A Woman Under the Influence.” Her best friends are 200 “feathered children” that roam her ramshackle rural property in upstate New York. Inside her fecal-specked motor home, roosters stalk kitchen counters, chickens lay eggs on the stovetop—a novel twist on free-range chickens—and ducks literally sleep on her head at night.

Kathy’s a doozie, while her long-suffering husband Gary, after 10 years of bird balderdash, has just about had it. “I like to look at them,” he says in Richard Miron’s FOR THE BIRDS, “but I wish they were a bit further away. The ‘cock-a-doodle-dos’ sometimes get on my nerves.” Filming over five years, Miron’s cameras immediately establish Kathy as a classic animal hoarder, collecting geese, ducks, chickens and turkeys like Beanie Babies, even if she can barely take care of them, much as a cat lady whose life’s meaning corresponds to her feline volume. “To me they’re family. You have to have something to believe in,” says Kathy. “I just seem to relate to them.”

If the doc fails to probe the pathology of Kathy’s kind of animal hoarder—which might be redundant given the glut of voyeuristic cable hoarder programs—it shows the repercussions: the SPCA rescues nearly all of Kathy’s fowl from “deplorable conditions,” a “fecal stew of mud and filth,” chronic overcrowding, injuries and illness and starvation, relocating them to the Woodstock Animal Sanctuary.

The strains on Kathy and Gary’s marriage prove too much, and as the movie winds down they are divorced but still friends. By then, the animals, thriving in a new world, are mostly behind us, and the focus is on the far more fragile humans. It’s both elegiac and bittersweet. “Just because you get older doesn’t mean you can’t change,” Kathy says, perhaps a little too late.