Binge-r #214: The Good Lord Bird + Sarah Cooper: Everything's Fine
Fight or Flight: Joshua Caleb Johnson (Henry) and Ethan Hawke (John) in The Good Lord Bird
THE GOOD LORD BIRD
Streaming Service: Stan
Availability: All seven episodes now streaming
Now that it has debuted enough weekly episodes to allow for a considered verdict, it’s fair to say that this revisionist drama is one of the most intriguing series of the year. The Good Lord Bird is set the Kansas Territory of 1859, when debate over the forthcoming state’s acceptance of the slave trade was settled by numerous murders and rival militias, and its unhinged figurehead is John Brown (Ethan Hawke), an abolitionist whose acts of violence to free slaves and start an armed insurrection lit a fuse that within two years would set off America’s cataclysmic Civil War. Leading family members and followers in his “gunfighters of the gospel”, Brown is a long-winded preacher and howling executioner. There’s nothing stately about his actions.
Dramatic depictions of slavery often founder due to reducing Black people to their suffering and elevating white saviours. The Good Lord Bird, which was created by Hawke and Mark Richard from James McBride’s acclaimed 2013 novel of the same name, outflanks both failings. There’s an absurdist strain to this period drama – imagine if Stephen Colbert adapted Cormac McCarthy – that reveals ludicrous but necessary truths. When Brown impulsively rescues 13-year-old slave Henry Shackleford (Joshua Caleb Johnson), he upends the boy’s life and somehow comes to believe that his new charge is a girl. It’s typical of how Brown is overwhelmed by his own delusions, but it also gives Henry a precarious measure of safety as he simply tries to steer clear of the many deaths that both precede and follow Brown.
Henry and his education about America’s realities is the true subject of this limited series. Most of the second episode is spent at a brothel where he’s hiding out, separated from John Brown but not the cruel crimes slavery institutionalises. The narrative gives varied voices to its imprisoned subjects, whether scathing or despairing, and doesn’t dwell on plantation life. The tone is fluid, with seditious comedy, family spats, Steve Zahn farce, and theatrical monologues intertwined, so that your expectations never settle, and it delivers contrasts between character and philosophies with a supporting cast that includes Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs as Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave turned activist whose oratory contrasts with a fundraising Brown. The past’s record, and the first scene, indicate that this is a tragedy, but the proportions and the resonance aren’t easily mapped. The Good Lord Bird liberates the historic epic from the strictures of respectability.
>> Great Show/New Season: The second season of Netflix’s period crime drama The Alienist is subtitled The Angel of Darkness, which is a touch obvious given how it opens with ill fate by lamplight and is mired in the shocking crimes – both in terms of depravity and subsequent cover-up – that define 1890s New York City. But the show itself continues to benefit from the pungent atmosphere, archival insight, and the strong performances of Daniel Bruhl, Dakota Fanning, and Luke Evans as intertwined investigators. If you’re intrigued, read my take on season one [full review here].
Bad Boys: Helen Mirren and Sarah Cooper in Sarah Cooper: Everything’s Fine
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
SARAH COOPER: EVERYTHING’S FINE (Netflix, 2020, 50 minutes): Chances are you’ve seen a clip of American comic Sarah Cooper online, where her lip-sync performances to Donald Trump’s press conferences puncture the Presidential veneer of his deluded answers with nothing more than fresh ears and pointed facial expressions. Her signature segment is called on multiple times in this middling comedy special, which positions Cooper as a beaming morning show host trying to make sunny sense of a flailing world. There are echoes of the ABC’s brilliant Get Krackin’ in that approach, but Cooper and director Natasha Lyonne tend to go for simmering irony over eruptive truth telling. The guest stars are legion, including Maya Rudolph as a weathercaster who’s had enough and Jon Hamm as a feckless CEO with a crackpot COVID cure, but the best slot in this 2020 rundown uses Helen Mirren to look back. The British icon and Cooper recreate in full Trump and Billy Bush’s Access Hollywood tape that was leaked in 2016, resulting in a deadpan sketch that mixes straight-faced surrealism and sobering prediction.
New on Stan: A nightmare of paranoia and invasive assimilation, John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982, 109 minutes) is a masterful piece of science-fiction horror, as a group of isolated American researchers are infiltrated by an alien parasite; shorn of the III that supposedly confused audiences, The Madness of King George (1994, 111 minutes) is a sharply drawn period comic-drama about the Regency-era monarch’s uneven mental health.
New on SBS on Demand: If you’ve marvelled at the recent performances of Jessie Buckley in Fargo S4 and Netflix’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, get straight to her stunning breakthrough performance in the psychological thriller Beast (2017, 103 minutes); Ang Lee’s terrific Eat Drink Man Woman (1994, 120 minutes) is a bittersweet Taiwanese family drama about the intricate dynamic between a chef and his three adult daughters.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about Netflix’s chess prodigy drama The Queen’s Gambit and the return of Sacha Baron Cohen with Borat Subsequent Moviefilm.
>> Want BINGE-R sent to your inbox? Click here for the weekly e-mail.
>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 266 series reviewed here, 154 movies reviewed here, and 36 lists compiled here.
