By Sandra Hall
★★★★
PG, 83 minutes
There are 154 recognised breeds of chook in the US but chicken people are a breed unto themselves.
Brian Caraker believes in singing to his chickens.
Chicken People director Nicole Lucas Haimes has found an engaging bunch of obsessives to guide us through the complexities that govern the world of the competitive poultry show. Brian Caraker calms his leghorns by singing them excerpts from 1960s jazz standards. Shari McCollough claims that her passion for white silkies cured her alcoholism. And Brian Knox, a self-described "hatchaholic", says his devotion to the silver-laced wyandotte – a bird whose intricately patterned feathers make it look like a pecking, clucking art deco masterpiece – has inspired a life-long interest in genetics.
We start with Caraker as he treats his charges to a few bars of The Way You Look Tonight. Then we follow the three breeders through their preparations for the annual Ohio National Championships, the poultry world's premier beauty pageant. They establish a tireless routine, shampooing, blow-drying, spraying and polishing, while pausing now and again to consult the breeders' bible, The American Standard of Perfection. Here, we find blueprints for the ultimate in bird beauty in every breed. Weight, line, posture, feather markings, colour and texture are all taken into account, along with brightness of eye and crest.
By the time their owners have finished with them, the brood has brushed up to look like an avian variation on the New Romantics.
All this would be easy to mock. After all, there are plenty of precedents. Christopher Guest and friends laid down the groundwork in their dog people comedy Best in Show (2000). But Haimes takes a more empathetic approach, helped by the air of self-deprecation the three breeders bring to the film. They admit that theirs is an esoteric obsession and they're accordingly grateful to their families for indulging them. Shari's family willingly put up with her ever-increasing army of feathered friends because they still remember the depression which used to leave her too drunk to stay up for dinner.
Knox's family is in the racing car business, he and his father are engineers and his mild-mannered mother is a retired driver with a least one near-death experience behind her. With all this tension in his life, it's easy to understand why such a gentle man should have chosen to escape into a pastime where the main thrills are in the revelations to be found in a chicken's family tree.
Caraker puts it best when he thanks his parents for tending his chickens while he's in town, earning a living with his singing. His ambition, he says, is to have his own farm so that he can take the pressure off them. "They're not chicken people," he says ruefully. "I'm chicken people."