The Good Lord Bird

Guided by a steady adaptation from veteran screenwriter Mark Richard and a gripping performance from Hawke, this filmed version is a rollicking good time, a lovely complement to McBride’s literary achievement that should drive more readers to the book.

The Good Lord Bird speaks to the present as well as the past. This is one of the most thoughtful and surprising series of an already impressive year: a historical epic of real vision.

The Good Lord Bird does an excellent job of balancing its serious subject matter with an almost breezy folktale tone. Each episode contains both profoundly emotional moments and beats that will make you laugh out loud. Also, it never veers into exploitation, which is a common pitfall in films that deal with American slavery.

Hawke mesmerizes as Brown — excellent casting for a wild-eyed character — and Johnson brings a mix of a child’s innocence and a young man’s recognition of the craziness of the world around him to his sometimes heartbreaking performance as Onion.

Rather than inflate or canonize John Brown, “The Good Lord Bird” embraces his humanity (even when it leans more toward explosive entertainment than strict historiography). And what entertainment it is. With a rollicking pilot from director Albert Hughes (“Menace II Society,” “From Hell”), the limited series is bursting with lively music, well-staged shootouts, and a wicked sense of humor. Holding it all together is Hawke.

The most revelatory part of The Good Lord Bird is how funny it is.

It is a Western at its core, filled with incredible settings and design, but it is vibrantly alive in ways that television versions of this genre haven’t been in years. Anchored by a truly remarkable performance from Ethan Hawke, “The Good Lord Bird” is smart, entertaining television that doesn’t highlight or underline its timeliness or messages as much as it allows the viewers to do half the work.

A boldly entertaining and ultimately moving seven-part limited series, producer and star Ethan Hawke does justice to the legend, and to history. [28 Sep - 11 Oct 2020, p.9]

The Good Lord Bird feels like complicated, adult television that assumes its audience will view it with intelligence. It asks questions that it doesn’t always wish to answer, and it has a surprising amount of fun doing so.

Certain skitlike scenes are thrillingly reminiscent of Monty Python; the series is like a cross between “Masterpiece Theatre” and a particularly elaborate episode of “Drunk History.” Hawke alternately stars and recedes into the background, as “The Good Lord Bird” swings nimbly from pulpy proto-Western to surreal, somewhat anachronistic social satire. ... The comedy of “The Good Lord Bird” is bawdy and dry, but the show is bighearted.

The show suffers a bit whenever Hawke is offscreen for too long, such as when Onion and his shrewd pal Bob (Hubert Point-Du Jour) split from Brown’s army for a time and our hero endeavors to hide his “true nature” while apprenticing at a brothel. But it’s enjoyable, in its humor, insight and preservation of McBride’s vivid language, even when its narrative momentum slackens.

What matters most is that the series takes a brutish time in history frequently presented dryly out of respect, and dares successfully to capture the uproarious insanity of a righteous, outgunned rebel. Brown's image may not be wholly transformed by this rendition of "The Good Lord Bird," but surely Hawke's work here should elevate our estimation of his skills and how far he's willing to do to resurrect our estimation of figures moldering and, if not forgotten, at least somewhat misconstrued.

“The Good Lord Bird,” Showtime’s new limited series about Brown and his mission, percolates with quirky and strange energy, overflowing with its sense of America as a place defined by its oddity.

“The Good Lord Bird” — a seven-episode adaptation of James McBride’s 2013 novel — is fine entertainment, capturing some measure of McBride’s jaunty, irreverent humor and featuring an absorbing performance by Ethan Hawke.

The Good Lord Bird” isn’t like many of the wrong-headed white savior stories I’ve seen; Hawke’s complex performance helps avoid some of those tropes (which are mentioned in Onion’s narration right at the top of the series), and the emphasis on Onion’s story as an orphan finding his power helps even more.

It’s startling how many laughs Hawke generates — and, for that matter, how funny The Good Lord Bird is as a whole, given its subject matter. Hawke, Richard, and their other collaborators (among the directors: Albert Hughes, Kevin Hooks, and Haifaa Al-Mansour) have managed to retain the satirical spirit of McBride’s book.

The miniseries is good—at times, great. But Hawke is beyond great; he is incandescent.

Executive producer McBride, Hawke and Richard don't want to fall into white savior tropes, and as big as Hawke's performance is, the grandiosity is there primarily to be punctured; Brown's very real affection for Onion is captured by Hawke more in beats of quiet regard than paternalistic puffery. Seven hours of The Good Lord Bird left me both clear-eyed about John Brown as a historical figure and curious to learn more. Above all, it left me with zero doubts about Hawke’s ever-evolving talent.

The Good Lord Bird is funny and strange, often entertaining and rarely self-serious.

The performances, the production’s gritty authenticity and the high stakes struggle mixed with droll observations about the committed but flawed people engaged in it makes “The Good Lord Bird” the TV event of the fall, and one of the best limited series of the year.

The series’s skepticism gradually melts away, leaving the final episodes to drag a bit as they focus more on constructing their vision of history rather than examining the characters and their ideals. But when it works, especially at the start, The Good Lord Bird invigorates its material with the rousing trappings of a semi-comedic western that gives it a particularly memorable sort of power.

As good as Hawke is here, Johnson just might be better. A winner.

Hawke’s titanic presence as John Brown makes The Good Lord Bird move along quickly and keeps its comedic undertones intact. The rest we can take or leave, but we’ll keep watching mainly because of the show’s star.