Streaming in November: “Catherine Called Birdy,” “Descendant, “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone,” more

Netflix | Descendant

These days, I want to clamp my hand over the mouth of anybody who says, “You know I’m not prejudiced, but…” Nothing good ever follows those words. I thought of that while watching a scene near the end of director Margaret Brown’s documentary, Descendant.

It happens aboard a motorboat touring the site of a sunken slave ship near Mobile, Alabama. A well-meaning White fellow, distant cousin of the captain hired to pilot that ship crammed full of kidnapped Africans from Benin in 1860, marvels that in historical accounts he’s read, one of those enslaved men claimed the “masters” treated him well.

The Black man beside him in the motorboat says, diplomatically, “It’s tough for me to make a qualitative difference in how you treat a slave, right?… A good master, a bad master; it’s equal in my book.”

The polite, awkward silence that follows sums up the uneasy power of the film. Descendant focuses on the living offspring of Clotilda survivors, brought illegally to the States on a bet by Mobile businessman Timothy Meaher, though the international slave trade had been outlawed 52 years earlier. The patriarch of the people delivered as contraband to the Mobile River’s shores, Cudjo Lewis, was the focus of Zora Neale Hurston’s book Barracoon, only published in 2018, though Hurston conducted interviews for it in the ’30s. Lewis’s offspring and those of others aboard the Clotilda still live where they were brought, Africatown, formerly known as Plateau and Magazine.

Descendant documents the discovery of the ship, burned on the water and sunk to hide evidence of the crime. More importantly, it focuses on the ripples that discovery had on the Black community, and the larger, Whiter Mobile community that has exploited Africatowners’ land throughout their history.

As the (White) dignitaries of Mobile line up to make public proclamations about the Clotilda’s discovery and pave the way for tourism, one Africatown resident voices suspicion that her people’s history is on the verge of being abducted, just as her ancestor’s actual bodies were 160 years ago. “It becomes another form of entertainment,” worries one of the film’s subjects, as he visits Montgomery’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice (aka the Lynching Memorial).

The notion of misery tourism and the much pricklier subject of reparations both arise in Descendant. This documentary does what some of the best in its genre do: raises more questions than it answers — the kinds of questions we need to be asking.

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Prime Video | Catherine Called Birdy 

When we first meet 14-year-old Birdy, she’s happily covered from top to toe in mud to celebrate a cottage-raising. Directed by Lena Dunham, at a far remove from the setting if not the spirit of her HBO series Girls, Catherine Called Birdy rejoices in the literal muck and other messy comic/sociological realities of medieval life. 

Thirteenth-century daughter of a wastrel dad, Lord Rollo (Fleabag’s priestly object of desire, Andrew Scott) and sexy, understanding mother Lady Aislinn (Billie Piper), Birdy (aka Lady Catherine) is content causing mischief with best pal, goat boy Perkin (Michael Woolfitt). 

But her happy life changes when Rollo, desperate to refill the coffers he’s emptied with high living and impulse purchases, aims to marry her off once she hits puberty. It’s a fate Birdy complains is “just because my birthright is to bleed.” (Yes, sensitive viewers, female biology is a plot point.) As she psychs out a variety of would-be suitors, Catherine Called Birdy lightly touches on inappropriate crushes, girlhood jealousies and even the difficulties facing young people other than our heroine, who find herself born into the wrong time, class and sexual orientation. As it hits its marks, the film gives fine moments to a spectacularly strong cast, including Sophie Okonedo as a lusty older woman, Joe Alwyn as Birdy’s dreamboat uncle and Lesley Sharp as the girl’s nurse/confidant. Birdy herself is played by the young but estimable Bella Ramsey, whose small role as the sage teen noblewoman Lyanna Mormont gave Game of Thrones some of its best moments not associated with dragons and ice zombies. 

Adapting the film from Karen Kushman’s book, Dunham presents Birdy with a rollicking style that might remind older film lovers of Tony Richardson’s Oscar-winning, badly dated but still infectiously energetic Tom Jones from 1963. 

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Hulu | Rosaline 

A Hulu original film with characters and concerns very similar to Catherine Called Birdy, Rosaline also views period mores through a modern-day lens, scored with contemporary tunes. In taking a snarkier, tidier route (no mud here!), it makes much less impact and isn’t nearly as fun. 

A side-eyed riff on Shakespeare that owes a debt to Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Rosaline takes as its heroine a figure never seen onstage, but alluded to in Romeo and Juliet. She’s the Capulet girl that a fickle young fellow from clan Montague is pining for … until he falls for her cousin at a masquerade ball. 

Yes, Rosaline (Kaitlyn Dever) is Romeo’s ex. And she’s not too happy about getting dumped, even going so far as to act all BFF with Juliet (Isabela Merced) to try to pry her away from Romeo (Kyle Allen). Allen seems to have been cast because he resembles, almost distractingly, Heath Ledger in that other teen Shakespeare adaptation, 10 Things I Hate About You. Yeah, watching Rosaline almost becomes a little meta… 

Anyway, like Birdy, Rosaline is a tart-tongued young woman with a mind of her own and a father whose bark actually conceals a puppyish heart. Here, the archetype is played by Bradley Whitford. While on the subject of parallels, the indispensable confidant figure, and making almost as much of her screen time as Sharpe, is Minnie Driver, rolling her eyes and reminding people that she is, in fact, “a registered nurse.” 

Also like Birdy, Rosaline has to put up with unsuitable suitors, though her deterrence methods aren’t as creative. To one of the guys, she merely says, “Blow me.” That’s a sign that the (two male) screenwriters aren’t just being anachronistic, they’re being lazy, too. Meanwhile, Rosaline spars with the only eligible man in sight who might be her match, the centerfold-handsome Dario (Sean Teale). Even before the movie contrives a way to get him out of his shirt, you’ll know exactly where this relationship is headed. 

If you watch Rosaline, you won’t hate yourself. We’ve just seen it all before, done fresher and better, from Shakespeare in Love to 10 Things. Two-timing the Bard, the movie even steals from Cyrano de Bergerac… I guess because the filmmakers figured why not riff on that other most famous theatrical balcony scene. 

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Netflix | Dahmer – Monster

Uber-producer Ryan Murphy (American Horror Story and all those American Crime Story bio-dramas) continues to overextend his brand on Netflix with two spooky limited series. They’re both based on true stories, and both go wrong in different ways. 

Drawing a ton of viewers when it dropped on the platform last month, despite the gruesome subject and the clumsy title, Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story spreads the tale of the Milwaukee serial killer over 10 long, mud-and-urine-colored episodes. Ryan regular Evan Peters (a decent actor, but never much more than that) plays Dahmer much the way he seemed in real life: handsome, blank, semi-robotic in almost a parody of a Midwestern stereotype. His bland, blond, seeming normalcy camouflaged, for years, his chronic drunkenness and bad habit of picking up men not for sex but to kill them — primarily people of color who could disappear without much public repercussion.

The outrage of the Milwaukee police force’s bungling of the case (ineptitude, homophobia and racism meeting in a perfect storm) gives Monster what power it has. But except for the sixth episode, which turns away from the tedium of Dahmer himself to focus on the life of one of his victims, the show is a chore.  It’s made semi-watchable thanks to the great Niecy Nash as Dahmer’s neighbor, who labored to draw attention to the weirdo down the hall, and the also-great Richard Jenkins as the killer’s baffled dad. For grisly completists, Netflix also offers the three-part Conversations with a Killer: The Jeffrey Dahmer Tapes (you know who you are). 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVHHs-xllqo

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Netflix | The Watcher

You can’t criticize Murphy’s work ethic. But you might wish he’d take a little time off and sit a little longer with his writers before they dash on to the next overly long and under-thought project. Example B: The Watcher. The 10-episode show is based on a truly unnerving, real-life story from New York Magazine, an unsolved mystery (pay attention to that “unsolved” part, viewers, to save yourself some heartache). 

In this fictionalized version, Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts play the Brannocks, a couple who move with their teen kids to a perfect, pricey home in New Jersey… and immediately begin to get extremely creepy letters from someone who self-identifies as The Watcher, and seems to have an intimate, almost supernatural ability to observe the family’s every action. Could it be one of their new neighbors or friends? 

The ridiculously rich supporting cast of suspects include Margo Martindale, Jennifer Coolidge, Christopher McDonald (also in Rosaline), Joe Mantello, Mia Farrow and Noma Dumezweni. Basically, the show’s 10 hours are about treading water, dramatically speaking. It’s a series of red herrings and fakeouts, with Cannavale and Watts spending a lot of time sipping Cabernet in their luxe, enormous kitchen. The Watcher is less a thriller than real estate porn on the level of a Nancy Meyers movie.   

A footnote. When Naomi Watts made a dazzling debut in that improbable David Lynch masterpiece Mulholland Drive in 2001, she seemed on the verge of a great career. She’s done well, but her tastes (or her agents) have tended to put her in victim roles, from The Ring to Funny Games to The Impossible to Prime Video’s recent remake of Goodnight Mommy. She even played that most overexposed victim of all, the Lady Spencer in Diana. It’s a little weird. Watcher is another same-ol’-same-ol’ addition to her credits. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HDkw100sXQ

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Netflix | Mr. Harrigan’s Phone

Speaking of footnotes, also on Netflix you’ll find Mr. Harrigan’s Phone, adapted from a Stephen King novella. In this typical bit of nostalgia-corn from the writer, Jaeden Martell plays Craig, a young man employed by his New England town’s resident Scrooge, Mr. Harrigan (Donald Sutherland). Craig’s job is to read from novels to the old man, and a grudging friendship develops. 

When Harrigan does what old men do, dies, the relationship continues supernaturally through the smartphone Craig gave to him as a gift. It seems that Harrigan’s spirit can dispatch the boy’s enemies from beyond the grave. That penciled-in plotline makes it sound like a typical revenge thriller, but John Lee Hancock’s film is something more bittersweet, ephemeral and ultimately disposable than that. It won’t exactly waste your time, but the main reason to watch is the ever-leonine Sutherland in his silvery late prime. 

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Netflix | The Midnight Club

Finally, in another October Netflix tradition, here’s the latest limited series from Mike Flanagan (The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor). From the episodes I sampled, The Midnight Club is free of the endless character monologues that ground Flanagan’s last show, Midnight Mass, to a halt. But there’s something a little formulaic yet also distasteful about Midnight. It’s based on a novel by Christopher Pike, telling of a bunch of terminally ill teens living in a very posh hospice/mansion near the seaside. They while away their last days and weeks with some of the expected YA drama and bickering. But at the witching hour, they gather in the basement to tell each other scary stories – which give the series the boosts of energy it needs… but not enough to keep me tuned in. You might have a better experience.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3cCROeOQLQ

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Hulu | Hellraiser 

For a gorier flick in time for Halloween, the reboot of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser is better than it has any right to be. That’s thanks in part to Atlanta native David Bruckner. The director first got noticed as one of the directors of 2007’s Atlanta-shot zombie whatsit The Signal. He’s since put his moody, unsettling imprint on episodes of two V/H/S films, The Ritual and The Night House. 

The new Hellraiser is grisly meat-and-potatoes, but it still has a flavor that lets you know Bruckner is behind the camera. Odessa A’zion plays a (frankly annoying) young junkie who gets the friends and family around her in trouble, mutilated or very dead via the kinky, lethal puzzle box introduced in the clumsy original Barker directed in 1987. 

The main points of any Hellraiser film (there have been countless bad sequels) are its mood, its grisly bodily mutilations and the wit of the set design. The new version succeeds with some really gruesome sequences and some M.C. Escher-in-Hell physical effects. There’s also an interesting metaphor for addiction rattling around in there, but the main attractions are the movie’s repulsions… 

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Disney+  | Werewolf by Night

On the unintentionally repulsive side of things, what should have been a Halloween treat goes splat in Disney/MCU-land with the hour-long special Werewolf by Night. 

For some reason, the Powers That Be decided to give a non-director his own shot in the role. That’s Michael Giacchino, the gifted composer behind countless huge movies. (He basically began as J.J. Abrams’s go-to music guy in the days of TV’s Alias, before J.J. Abrams became the J.J.-Freakin’-Abrams responsible for rebooting franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek.) 

The setup here is good: A gathering of monster hunters vie to pick up the mantle of the recently deceased Ulysses Bloodstone. Shot in nostalgic black-and-white that made me want to re-watch Tim Burton’s great Ed Wood, Werewolf stars Gael García Bernal as a feckless adventurer with a secret and Laura Donnelly as a prodigal Bloodstone daughter, who is supposed to have chemistry with Bernal, but does not. 

Directed without tempo, Werewolf is neither lurid nor scary nor funny nor campy enough to make an impression. The director doesn’t seem to know what to do with the material. Here’s hoping Giacchino will return to his considerable musical talents, and leave the moviemaking to other gals and guys. 

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming column here.