Binge-r #244: Sweet Tooth + Lisey's Story
My Deer Boy: Christian Convery (Gus) in Sweet Tooth
SWEET TOOTH S1
Streaming Service: Netflix
Availability: All eight episodes now streaming
There are too many dramas with post-apocalyptic settings on streaming services already, replete with society in ruins, snarling marauders, and a mission to save the world. This new Netflix series, created by Jim Mickle (Hap and Leonard) from Jeff Lemire’s 2009 comic book, nominally exists in that milieu, where a virus (“The Sick”) has collapsed civilisation with startling ease, but it is told in part from the defining perspective of a child whose very existence is an act of wonder. With a narrator (Josh Brolin) who sounds like they’re delivering the most bittersweet of picture books, Sweet Tooth looks at the world through fresh eyes, so that adventure and survival are uncomfortably close and violence feels like the inevitable, shocking conclusion of adult motivation.
First seen as a baby being carried into the heart of the Yellowstone National Park by his isolationist father (Will Forte), where he grows into a 10-year-old boy, Gus (Christian Convery) is a hybrid – a human baby with animal features and traits, which started to be born at the same time as the virus was ravaging the world. The connection between the two events is unknown, but hybrids are both hated and hunted by many survivors, a situation tenderly conveyed by the warnings of the outside world and other people that the father passes on to his antlers-growing son. “If I see a human, I will hide,” is the lesson dutifully recited by Gus, who via Convery has a fount of adolescent emotions that the storytelling deploys, but by the end of the first episode his forest idyll is shattered.
His primary travelling companion is Big Man (Nonso Anozie), a threatening figure who thankfully doesn’t become a mere protector of Gus as he quests for answers. Other fragments of this new America are revealed in the strands of Aimee (Dania Ramirez), who has made it her mission to protect young Hybrids, and Aditya Singh (Adeel Akhtar), a former doctor whose recovered community harbours unspoken rules and expectations that prove to be increasingly dangerous. Survival, “no matter the cost”, is the only goal that matters the latter is told, but with Gus as the focus this is as much a coming of age story and a quest for identity as a journey across the Badlands. It’s not just for children, but also adults who remember what it is to be young.
The Tree of Life: Julianne Moore (Lisey) and Clive Owen (Scott) in Lisey’s Story
LISEY’S STORY (Apple TV+, all eight episodes now streaming): The two sides of this moody supernatural thriller are often in conflict: in adapting his 2006 novel about the widow of a famous author Stephen King opts for the hot touch of horror and pulp suggestion, while director Pablo Larrain (Jackie) is drawn to the disassociation and icy high cheekbones of star Julianne Moore, evocatively breaking out of the plot’s stoking to frame a woman literally caught between worlds. The many talents are always present, always adding to the limited series, but it’s not clear if they add up, while the presence of Dane DeHaan, as an obsessive and soon threatening devotee of the celebrated Scott Landon (Clive Owen), the late husband of Moore’s Lisey, bludgeons most of the nuance out of the narrative. A menacing mystery, complete with clues, the show is sometimes too literal, constantly using flashbacks and other techniques to bring Scott into Lisey’s life. At a certain point you might wonder if the title is inaccurate in describing whose story this is.
>> Good Shows/New Seasons: Netflix has a second season of comic Mae Martin’s finely wrought and autobiographical anti-romantic-comedy Feel Good [season one review here], plus more episodes of Kim’s Convenience, the absurdly endearing Korean-Canadian sitcom about a family’s imperfect progress [season one review here].
NEWLY ADDED MOVIES
New on Netflix: Jason Statham has rarely hit less people in a film than in the Bank Job (2008, 112 minutes), a 1970s London heist procedural based on real life larceny and capably shaped by veteran director Roger Donaldson; The Bone Collector (1999, 117 minutes) has the intriguing if deliberately restrained dynamic of Angelina Jolie and Denzel Washington in a 90s crime thriller directed by Phillip Noyce that Hollywood no longer makes.
New on Stan: If you’re lockdown invested in the possible resurrection of Bennifer, feel free to remember how clunky Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez were in the mob comedy Gigli (2003, 122 minutes), which put an end to director Martin Brest’s career; The Big Sick (2017, 120 minutes) is a witty, bracing update of the romantic comedy with Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan as a couple divided by illness, culture, and eventually Holly Hunter.
New on SBS on Demand: After the remarkable Fish Tank, Andrea Arnold made a stark revisionist take on Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights (2011, 124 minutes) that was shot in a boxy 4:3 ratio as the bleak Yorkshire moors and the 1800s realism batters the hope of love between Heathcliff (James Howson) and Cathy (Kaya Scodelario) to pieces.
>> Missed last week’s BINGE-R? Click here to read about the unexpected return of Netflix’s Master of None and Amazon’s masterful drama The Underground Railroad.
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>> Check the complete BINGE-R archive: 310 series reviewed here, 162 movies reviewed here, and 40 lists compiled here.
