Guy Lodge Film CriticLate in “The Starling,” at a stage when Melissa McCarthy’s grieving mother has never felt more distant from her withdrawn husband, she receives a pep talk from Kevin Kline’s wise confidante about the titular bird.
When starlings mate, he explains, they build and protect their nest together: “They’re just not meant to exist in the world alone.” “Real subtle stuff,” she responds, with a trademark McCarthy grimace.It’s a bit rich at this point for “The Starling” to lampshade such a cornily obvious metaphor, given that Theodore Melfi’s film has already given us ample scenes of McCarthy’s character growing and nurturing a vegetable garden from scratch on dried-out, weed-strewn land, defending it from the aforementioned.
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