The Good Lord Bird

The Good Lord Bird is a Showtime mini-series, consisting of 8 episodes.  The program adapts a celebrated recent novel by James McBride.  The story contains the violent career of John Brown, the abolitionist, as viewed through the eyes of a young man, a slave who is accidentally enlisted in Brown's increasingly quixotic attempts to emancipate the enslaved people in the South.  The show is compelling and has some very fine scenes, but it doesn't exactly succeed.  McBride's novel was hailed for originality with respect to the voice in which the story is told, first-person narrative provided by Onion, the young man who provides his commentary on John Brown's doomed crusade.  The book was compared favorably to Twain's Huckleberry Finn and acclaimed for its humor and wit.  As presented on Showtime, the series isn't particularly funny -- in fact, the show's dominant tone is rather mournful.  The ultimate failure of Brown's efforts, culminating in the raid on Harper's Ferry, seems assumed in advance and the picture is more elegy than picaresque romp.  The concept on which the book is based is to provide a sort of worm's eye view of historical events, a perspective on Brown's terrorism and his guerilla war for emancipation that is true to the sordid details, but respects the man's fundamental heroism.  In form, the approach is similar to Thomas Berger's Litter Big Man and Arthur Penn's film based on that book -- the wars with the Plains Indians recounted through the memories of a 103 year old man, not prone to mythologizing and with an eye toward the ridiculous and farcical.  The problem that The Good Lord Bird faces is apparent from my mention of Berger's Little Big Man:  since Gunter Grass' The Tin Drum and Dog Years, novelists have been devising oblique angles from which to view tragic and celebrated historical events.  The Tin Drum, for instance, views World War II through the eyes of a dwarf with magical powers who has refused to grow beyond the body of a small toddler; Dog Years tells the story of the Nazis and Hitler through the lens of the Fuehrer's German Shepherd.  This device, the narrator who incidentally happens to be present at famous events (while foraging for food or sex or simply trying to save his own skin) has become, accordingly, a shop-worn technique that has lost its original frisson.  Earlier works in this genre, most particularly Little Big Man worked on the basis of undercutting as specious or, even, vicious, the heroics of famous figures in history -- but we no longer believe that the great men of the past were particularly heroic and have become all too aware of their human foibles or worse.  Thus, The Good Lord Bird has nothing to de-glamorize -- we start with the proposition that historical events arise from squalid motives that are worked-out in a series of sordid, or, even, ridiculous actions.  In the popular media, John Brown has generally been regarded as a madman or a ranting terrorist -- he appears in this form in Stephen Vincent Benet's epic poem on the Civil War, John Brown's Body as well as in the Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland spectacle Santa Fe Trail (where he is impersonated by Raymond Massey).  Therefore, John Brown has never been universally regarded as a hero and, so, a program of revisionist history about his life doesn't make any sense.  No one really regarded Brown as much of a hero post-Civil-War (of course, he was a hero to Whitman, Thoreau, and Emerson)-- in fact, the 1940 Santa Fe Trail (which has nothing to do Santa Fe) is actually a pro-slavery film and, therefore, regards Brown with contempt.  So it's hard to make a revisionist history about a figure who has been treated with derision for the last 150 years.  This is a shame because Brown's wild-eyed plan to raise a slave army and equip them with pikes is actually comical, at least, viewed in a certain light.  In fact, a funny and disturbing black comedy could be produced on the subject.  The Good Lord Bird is not that movie.  Indeed, after a few skeptical moments  in the first couple episodes, the film becomes increasingly hagiographic -- John Brown comes to appear as a kindly, saintly fellow willing to sacrifice himself for a cause that is unreservedly noble.  Indeed, his unwavering commitment to emancipation as shown in the series, even, affronts most of the Black characters -- even Frederick Douglas recoils from his insane effort to raise a slave insurrection at Harper's Ferry.  In the first couple shows, we see some of the violence in "Bleeding Kansas" and Brown's murderous attacks on pro-slavery planters might be interpreted as a form of terrorism.  But the film makes Brown's victims, with a couple of exceptions so loathsome as to soften the scenes in which these villains are killed.  The pro-slavery forces are so vicious and benighted that we don't really feel anything when they are gunned down or beheaded (off-screen) -- the White victims of Brown's fury deserve what they get.  Later, the film hardens into glorification of Brown and the scenes at Harper's Ferry, although very accurate in the broad sense, are too pious to be particularly engrossing -- by this point, Brown has become some kind of corn-pone Jesus.

Nonetheless, there are many things to admire in the show.  Ethan Hawke's portrayal of Brown, although monotonous, is very effective.  (However, Hawk's performance becomes increasingly sentimental as the film proceeds -- it's as if Hawke who co-produced the series can't bear to appear as a vicious killer:  rather, his political views seem merely eccentric.)   Most of the violence in the first episodes is shot for comic effect -- people run around in confusion, posturing for the camera with mock-heroic gestures before their gory deaths.  The show's portrait of the Middle Border in 1858 is compelling and the scenes at Harper's Ferry have a gloomy verisimilitude.  The last comic flourishes wither away after Frederick Douglas is side-lined -- he's a Falstaffian figure with a virtuous Black wife, a saucy White mistress, and, always, concerned to self-aggrandize himself.  When Douglas refuses to support Brown's raid on the armory at Harper's Ferry, some of the energy is leached out of the film.  Onion, the movie's point-of-view, is condemned to wear girl's clothing because, for some reason, John Brown thinks he is a young woman.  This idea probably seemed good on paper and may be funny in the novel, but movies are too literal and it's impossible to believe that this handsome young man is plausible as a pretty young girl. The film's title sequence, a vigorous animation reprising the major themes in the show, is excellent -- it looks a little like the art work of the African-American Jacob Lawrence and has a raw zest that is absent from much of the program.  There's an excellent soundtrack mostly comprised of spirituals, although performed in modern-sounding renditions.  The White slaveholders are uniformly despicable.  The Black characters are enterprising, resolute, courageous, and much smarter than the nasty, pallid Caucasian slave owner -- a lot of them have bad hairdos and are overweight.  There's a recent convention that has ossified into a tendentious cliche -- this is the full-frontal shot of Black men or women (or children) emphasizing by the hieratic rigidity of the pose, the dignity and portentous gravity of these figures.  The people stare at the camera unmoving as if scrutinizing the audience and demanding their due from us.  It's an effective technique, first used by Werner Herzog of all people in his short documentary about a Black preacher, Brother Huey's Sermon.  (Spike Lee makes use of this sort of portrait footage in both Da Five Bloods as well as his rendition of David Byrne's concert in American Utopia.  Here the film features shots of what are called in today's jargon, "enslaved people", handsome figures who stare at the camera.  But, of course, these people aren't slaves and, in fact, are good-looking Hollywood actors paid to look brave and downtrodden in these shots -- it would have been far more effective to show actual shots of enslaved people at the end of the movie to make these points about the essential humanity and dignity of the African-Americans in the film.  In a film like this, one expects there to be lots of rambunctious action -- the first few episodes go from one slaughter to another at a swift pace, but it's neither rambunctious, nor comic, nor, even, effectively savage.  Curiously, the film becomes better when devoted to speeches.  In about the fourth or fifth episode, we see two back to back speeches, one by John Brown and another by Harriet Tubman, whom the Black characters call "the General."  These speeches, which one might think would slow down the film, in fact, enliven it considerably with the sense that this material means something -- that it has historical force and dignity.