The Good Lord Bird, a seven-part adaptation of James McBride’s 2013 National Book Award-winning novel, conjures the spirit of Mark Twain in its opening titles: "All of this is true," we read, and "most of it happened." As with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the narrator of which notes on Page 1 Twain’s penchant for “stretchers,” we’re in surreal, tragicomic territory, part perilous forest, part Barnumesque carnival, with a mere child for our Virgil. And the taller this tale grows, the more easily it takes in the big picture.
The work to which The Good Lord Bird pays homage isn’t really Huck Finn, though, but Charles Portis’s True Grit, in which a young girl is forced both to ally and contend with violent and to varying degrees unhinged men. For Rooster Cogburn, we have real-life fanatical abolitionist John Brown (Ethan Hawke), and for Mattie Ross, the boy slave Henry Shackleford (Joshua Caleb Johnson), who is in short order orphaned, freed, mistaken for a girl, nicknamed “Onion,” and made to wear various dresses for the entirety of his service in Brown’s rabble army.
Hawke as John Brown is both the cynosure and the stumbling block of The Good Lord Bird. He screams and thunders and spits like an improv guy doing his best Daniel Plainview, and with his unkempt hair and beard and his crazed eyes, he looks now like Harrison Ford, now like Nick Nolte, now like Nick Nolte’s mug shot. The show makes comic hay of his long-winded preaching and his fondness for passion over planning, but sometimes the audience wishes, along with his co-conspirators, that he’d settle down a bit.
Did Hawke err in casting himself as the hero, in the most literal white savior role imaginable, of the show he co-created? Is this a bid for attention or accolades in a year of unusually acute racial unrest? Per a New Yorker profile, he learned of McBride’s novel in 2015 from a director of photography on the set of 2016’s The Magnificent Seven. It was the book’s humor that hooked him, and he approached his adaptation with reverence for the subject matter, leavened with a firm, not to say messianic conviction that laughter would make its lessons more palatable.
The result is uneven but entertaining, and as pure of heart as its young narrator. In its favor, it borrows the Coen brothers’ love of caricatures and grotesques, of characters who serve as living embodiments of human foibles. (They were, after all, True Grit’s best adapters.) Fans of the Coen flair for juiced-up period dialogue will be at home here, too, with lines like, “I’m just a farmer trying to make a dollar change pockets,” or, “He’s nuttier than a squirrel turd,” or Henry’s word-salad botch of a blessing at Frederick Douglass’s dinner table.
The show is brilliantly cast, crowded round with faces straight out of a Civil War-era tintype: David Morse as Henry’s doomed master, Dutch Henry; Beau Knapp as Owen Brown, one of John’s seven sons; Zainab Jah as the oracular Harriet Tubman; Crystal Lee Brown as the madness-feigning slave Sibonia; Steve Zahn as an errant scumbag; and Wyatt Russell as a federal officer made to walk a fine line between death and dishonor.
Opinion may divide sharply on Daveed Diggs (Hamilton) and his comic portrayal of Frederick Douglass as a vain, vaguely lecherous, limelight-loving coward, secure in his Northern opulence, always ready with an eloquent objection or excuse in the face of Brown’s call to violent insurrection. (“You are a fanatic,” he tells Brown. “I am a realist.”) Yet the argument between Douglass and Brown — between rhetoric and action, forbearance and violence — is the true subject of The Good Lord Bird. When is passionate action too hasty and reckless to help more than it hurts? When does persuasion run out of steam? When is fanaticism necessary?
That The Good Lord Bird even asks these questions elevates it above the simple heroes vs. villains showdown it can’t (and shouldn’t) avoid becoming. Just because there is no moral ambiguity to be wrung from the question of slavery doesn’t mean this oddly lighthearted show need fall into the trap of being accidental YA. The ambiguity lies in how seemingly impossible problems are best approached: whether there is nobility in a suicide mission such as the raid on Harpers Ferry or whether sobriety and foresight more often win the day.
The show is on shakier ground answering these questions than posing them. Douglass comes across as more of a quavering buffoon than most will be comfortable with, and when Tubman appears like a deus ex machina to reassure a group of recruits that Brown’s plan must be a good one because he is a good man, the audience already knows that she isn’t quite right. Brown will die a symbol of conviction and hope, not a victor in the strictly military sense, and circumstances leave the audience free to question his judgment. Indeed, we are all but encouraged to question his sanity.
Then again, Brown’s probable madness mostly serves to humanize him. The Good Lord Bird deserves praise for acknowledging and forgiving the whole spectrum of human frailty. When an opportunistic black prostitute betrays a group of slaves, resulting in a mass hanging, horrified Henry is told, “Colored turn the tables on each other just like white folks.” Henry, for his part, must finally reckon with the fact that he’s been masquerading as a girl in order to shirk his share of hardship and danger.
It is only after Henry falls for Brown’s daughter Annie (Maya Hawke) that he awakens to a sense of duty and abruptly reveals, to himself as much as to Annie, that he’s a man. Embedded in the show’s celebration of duty and sacrifice are questions about authority and presumption: Who may speak for the oppressed, and how? Who may lead them? John Brown himself receives a lacerating rebuke for his presumption. “Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro except the Negro” is a lament still heard, mutatis mutandis, in our day.
Still and all, John Brown comes out looking pretty respectable, lunatic or not. In large part, this is because The Good Lord Bird foregrounds Brown as a father. He risks his children’s lives not out of carelessness or fanaticism but to preserve their self-respect and, to take a more theological approach, their freedom from sin. That he seems, in this telling, to want the same for his worst enemies may be the most alien and jarring thing about him. Well, what can you say? They sure don’t make ’em like they used to.