The Crazy Comedy of John Brown

J ohn Brown must surely have been one of the fiercest men who ever lived, a single-minded avenger who was, depending on your point of view, either God’s merciless right arm of retribution or America’s first celebrity serial killer. What seems obvious about the man is that he took his mission to personally strike down slavery with as much seriousness as anyone has ever approached anything.

So what if we approached the tale of John Brown as . . . a comedy?

The Good Lord Bird, the just-concluded seven-part Showtime series adapted from James McBride’s novel, proceeds from a bizarre, crazy premise that turns out to be absolutely ingenious. My colleague Dan McLaughlin has suggested that Mel Gibson — a man with a chip on his shoulder the size of Kansas, a religious zealot, the owner of a pair of blue eyes that pierce like the tip of an arrow, all drawn together by Brownian grooming habits that tend toward the feral — would have been an ideal choice to play Brown, and I heartily agreed. Instead, now comes Ethan Hawke to fill Brown’s holy boots. Ethan Hawke? Hawke was a boy in Dead Poets Society and boyish in many films for many years thereafter. He developed some grit as an actor, but always suffered from a certain lack of intensity. Ethan Hawke as the living embodiment of righteous fury, stalking the landscape searching for sinners to smite? Ethan . . . Hawke?

Yes, Ethan Hawke. Hawke (who created the series with Mark Richard) is a superb choice to play the Old Man. Hawke is 50; Brown lived only to be 59. Close enough. Wearing a lunatic’s beard and crusty makeup, Hawke does look the part. As for conveying the internal furnace that drove Brown, who was born in Connecticut, all the way out to Bleeding Kansas in the 1850s on a self-assigned mission to hunt down and kill Missouri border ruffians — the redshirts who sought to import slavery into the new territory — Hawke has a clever approach. He asks us to consider Brown, a man so locked in his own era that his actions are scarcely comparable to us today, in 21st-century terms. Hawke’s Brown is a forerunner of a woke campus vice president for diversity. Today’s administrative class of progressive white allies leave us in no doubt that, had they been adults in the 1850s, they would have put their lives on the line to combat slavery. What if one of these guys were telling the truth? What if their stern insistence that racism is the chief problem facing America in the 21st century were not a pose, and what if you put arms in their hands and placed them in an era when racism was many times worse than it is today?

2020 turns out to be an excellent time for this miniseries to land. At a moment when Hollywood, and the culture in general, are directing more of their energies to a single topic than at any time since World War II, The Good Lord Bird turns out to be the smartest, most profound, and most mature approach to issues surrounding the status of black America that I’ve come across. McBride paints a picture showing how deeply slave culture was interwoven with the culture in general, how futile Brown’s efforts were, and how greatly he endangered the black folk he claimed to serve.

Brown took the bravest, most direct anti-slavery action imaginable — he raised an army and went in search of slaves to free and slaveholders to punish. And The Good Lord Bird makes clear that his approach was completely insane. Of course his mission will fail spectacularly, we think as the series goes on: Just look at the man. This crazed crusader is not going to lead a righteous band that topples slavery; he’s going to attract barely half a platoon of ragged men, five of them his own sons, and lead them nowhere but to their own deaths. We’re not talking about Mel Gibson here. It’s only Ethan Hawke.

The series is told largely through the eyes of a fictional character, a slave freed by Brown named Henry (Joshua Caleb Johnson) who embodies the Old Man’s loose grip on reality: Brown mishears the kid’s name as Henrietta and mistakes him for a girl. So Henry (nicknamed “Little Onion”) obligingly spends most of the show wearing a dress and allowing men to do his heavy lifting for him, even as others around him note that he makes a poor excuse for a female. Henry’s pose as a girl is no more ridiculous than Brown’s pose as the man who will defeat slavery. The kid is among those who watch in horror as Brown chops the head off a homesteader who owns no slaves. Brown finds the man is ideologically on the side of slavery, and so he must die as horribly as possible.

From Little Onion’s point of view, Brown looks like one of the 21st century’s obsessed white folks who are constantly putting themselves and their ideas about racism forward while evincing very little interest in black folk except as props. Onion becomes one of a handful of blacks who join Brown’s tiny band, mostly because he has no choice, not because he admires this clueless would-be revolutionary who is such a poor personnel manager that he spends two hours saying grace before a meal as his men’s stomachs growl. Brown drags Onion east to raise money for abolition, and to meet “the king of the Negroes” — Frederick Douglass (Daveed Diggs). Diggs famously played Thomas Jefferson as a prancing peacock in Hamilton, and he plays Douglass as a vainglorious stuffed shirt, in love with the sound of his own orotund declarations, not interested in actually taking up arms with Brown. This is bold, challenging television that avoids the usual trap of being simplistic about heroes and villains. Surely vanity was as much a human motivation 160 years ago as it is today.

When Onion protests that, before he met Brown, he never went hungry, never slept out in the cold, and never saw a man kill another man, Brown realizes sadly he can’t allow the kid to say anything at his fundraisers. “I would stay off that subject entirely,” the Old Man tells him. Brown’s Christian zealotry comes across as merely another manifestation of his egoism; how arrogant is it to claim to have direct access to God’s wishes, even to claim he has advice from the Almighty on what tactics to employ in a firefight with some redshirts? Brown turns his speeches — equal parts sermon and horror story — into the equivalent of a woke seminar on the scourge of racism. The primary purpose of these gatherings, it seems to Onion, is to allow white people to demonstrate to one another their anguish about the plight of blacks while blacks themselves serve as decoration: “Everybody got to make a speech about the Negro but the Negro.”

The Good Lord Bird dryly observes that the first person killed in Brown’s raid intended to free the slaves at Harpers Ferry, Va., was a noncombatant black man — a porter for the railroad there who is slain in one of many instances of total ineptitude by Brown’s army. Several more blacks died along with Brown. Killing black people to save black people? In 1859 as today, racism and slavery turned out to be knotty subjects that resisted even the most righteous sword. Bravo to this dazzling miniseries for bringing so much complexity, irony, and black comedy to a story we all thought we knew.