Director: Theodore Melfi
Writers: Matt Harris
Stars: Melissa McCarthy, Chris O’Dowd, Kevin Kline
Synopsis: A couple struggles to put their marriage back together after a loss.
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If there’s one cliché in Hollywood that is true, it’s that comedy is harder than drama. The irony of it, though, is that comedic actors are still not recognized nearly enough for the level of difficulty in their craft, and it’s often not until they turn to dramatic roles that the accolades roll in. Granted, not all comic actors can deliver a great dramatic performance, but the ones who can seem to be really good at it. Most recently, Melissa McCarthy has followed this trend, earning an Oscar nomination in 2018 for her dramatic role in Can You Ever Forgive Me? McCarthy, who is best-known for her broad, physical comedy, nailed it as a depressed writer who turns to forgery to keep her career going, proving she certainly is more than a one-trick pony. McCarthy has continued on the dramatic trend this year, starring in the Hulu limited series, Nine Perfect Strangers, and in director Theodore Melfi’s new film, The Starling.
McCarthy is joined in The Starling by two other comedic actors, Chris O’Dowd and Kevin Kline, who happens to be one of the few actors the Academy has rewarded for a comedic performance, when Kline won Best Supporting Actor in 1988 for his iconic role in A Fish Called Wanda. Having receded somewhat from the limelight in recent years though, it’s a welcome sight to see Kline in a movie again, The Starling marking only his fourth film in the last five years. As for O’Dowd, his career has continued to gain steam since he first gained attention by American audiences in the 2011 box office hit, Bridesmaids. The Starling is a reunion for O’Dowd and McCarthy, who not only were in Bridesmaids together, but also St. Vincent, the 2014 dramedy starring Bill Murray, also written and directed by Melfi. Melfi is following a similar formula in The Starling, giving Melissa McCarthy a dramatic vehicle in which she can not only find humor and pathos, but allowing her to share the screen with a legend. Unfortunately, though, the overly sentimental and predictable screenplay leaves the actors to fend for themselves to mine for magic and the result is an uneven message movie that you can see coming a mile away.
McCarthy and O’Dowd play married couple Lilly and Jack, whose infant daughter died of SIDS. While neither handled the death well, Jack found it the hardest to cope and ended up checking himself into a mental hospital to try and get right. Meanwhile, Lilly is trying to cope in her own way, cleaning out the house, obsessing over things at work, and deciding it’s time to plant a garden in her front yard. Whenever she tries to do anything in her yard, however, she is attacked by a territorial bird, a starling, who dive-bombs her every chance it can get. Lilly channels much of her bubbling rage and desire to get control of her life back into taking out this bird, which proves to be much more difficult that she thought.
As for Jack, he is simply unable to move on from the death of his daughter, and his marriage is suffering mightily from it. While Lilly does visit weekly and they both want to find a way to keep their marriage together, neither of them knows how to do it and they continue to pick unnecessary fights with each other. After one especially bad visit, a nurse at the hospital suggests that Lilly visit a therapist she knows in her town, who is really good. When Lilly goes to find him, she finds he’s now a veterinarian, having quit psychiatry years before. But Dr. Fine, played by Kevin Kline, is moved by Lilly’s story and offers to help, more as a friend than a doctor. It turns out Lilly needs him more than she ever was willing to admit.
It would be a true insult to the caliber of talent involved with this film to label it not much more than a Hallmark made-for-television movie, but it’s really not that far off. The high level of performances, especially from O’Dowd and Kline, lift The Starling out from its mediocrity, but the screenplay is still riddled with over-sentimentality, predictability, and plot devices that feel manufactured, and not just because the titular starling is completely computer-generated—although that really doesn’t help. Melfi’s direction matches his screenplay, in that it depends way too much on unnatural emotional beats to trigger a response from its characters and from the audience.
What makes it worse is the fact that McCarthy seemingly doesn’t have enough confidence in her dramatic skills to deliver a performance that doesn’t use comedy as a crutch. Lilly has moments of real poignancy that are interrupted by a sight gag or a pratfall. If Melfi had just let those moments get a little darker, go a little deeper, the film might have been more than a surface-level, Hollywood-style look at depression and mental illness. But instead, the film bails out just when it starts to get interesting, and we are forced into awkward laughter by a manufactured comic bit. While McCarthy is still a good dramatic performer, she relies just a bit too much on her innate charm and natural comic tendencies. If she pushes out of her comfort zone, it could be a much more effective performance.
O’Dowd is given much deeper places to roam in his performance, and he delivers with heartbreaking effectiveness. He instead uses his comic instincts to hide his character’s pain, a powerful tool that he breaks out with subtlety and warmth. Kline is similarly endearing, even though he really doesn’t have much to work with. He too is offered a comedic escape route in nearly every scene, as his character is always surrounded by animals, but he never takes it, giving a real and heartfelt performance that is designed to be the anchor of the film and ends up being the exact thing that keeps it afloat.
Far beyond the uneven performances is the fact that The Starling gets lost in its own message. There is no character building or storytelling, just a hammer-on-the-head oversentimentality that ends up misfiring due to lack of a sincere emotional connection. And way too much time is spent on the metaphor of the starling itself, the CGI bird that couldn’t be more on the nose if it were carrying a sign.
While it is great to see these comic talents get the chance to show the world their skills are much more than joke-deep, all three deserved a better vehicle than The Starling, a film that gets in its own way and works way too hard to achieve far too little.
