Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Starling’ on Netflix, an Annoying Dramedy in Which Melissa McCarthy Battles Her Way Through Grief, and Some Aggressive Bird Attacks

Netflix movie The Starling is the latest Melissa McCarthy vehicle, and after a string of creative blowouts — Superintelligence, Thunder Force, The Kitchen — she’s due for one that stays on the road. So maybe this medium-weight dramedy about, uh, death and ornithology, I guess, will steer her straight? It’s directed by Theodore Melfi of Hidden Figures fame, and features a somewhat rare modern-day Kevin Kline performance, so maybe that’ll lift it over the top.

THE STARLING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet Lilly (McCarthy) and Jack (Chris O’Dowd) while they’re painting a mural on the nursery wall and talking about their baby daughter’s future, and in a certain type of movie, that means the baby is probably doomed. Is this that certain type of movie? Hmm; I soldier on: Next, we watch as a bird, crafted of dubious CGI, embarks on an epic quest, flying thither and fluttering yonder, to acquire a wrapper from a specific brand of “nutrition” bar for its nest. The nest’s nestled in a tree outside a cute rural house that would be perfect for a family, assuming the family is still together and not torn apart by death. That would be sad.

Cut to: Lilly, very absent-mindedly working at a grocery store. Her manager, Travis Delp (Timothy Olyphant, who should never, ever play a character with the surname “Delp”), lectures her because she’s not putting forth much effort, although it’s kind of understandable, since that thing happened to her — that thing that hasn’t been explained yet, although we kind of already know what happened. She drives out to a place where Jack lives now, and that place is a place where there are group therapy meetings. It’s an institution, is what I’m trying to say, and that the movie is trying to say without coming out and saying it, although it would help a little if it did that. You’ll gradually gather that it’s a mental institution, and even though Jack’s the one in the institution, his doctor tells Lilly, “You have to do the work too,” which is something she doesn’t really want to hear. She gives Lilly the number of a doctor to call, and his name is Larry Fine (Kline), nyuk nyuk nyuk, and of course he’s a veterinarian. He used to be a psychologist but he quit and now he runs an office where Lilly can visit to get her leg humped by a randy dog.

Lilly can’t just sit around and do nothing in the cute house where there is no baby and she’s alone because her husband’s institutionalized, so she gets out the mower and tries to do something about the long-neglected lawn. This is when she’s divebombed by some symbolism and ends up on the ground, bleeding. Things are bad. She talks Dr. Larry Fine into helping her figure out what kind of bird the bird is so it has more symbolical/metaphoricish value, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s a starling, and wouldn’t you also know it, he starts listening to her problems. She starts wearing a football helmet as she whips the garden into shape, so the aggressive and territorial winged analogy will just bounce off her head now. She also cleans out the nursery and trades the crib and all her furniture to a passerby for a crappy fake leather recliner, because that’s “quirky” and “funny,” theoretically.

Meanwhile, Jack struggles through his therapeutic pottery class and pretends to take his meds, spitting them out and hiding them in a shoe. He says he doesn’t want Lilly to visit him anymore, and she gets angry, because she’s been bringing him a specific brand of snack cake every week because she knows he’s loved that specific brand of snack cake since he was a kid, and now she spends too much time at work stacking packages of that specific brand of snack cake into an elaborate pyramid like a total nut. Anyway, Jack and Lilly are growing apart. We still don’t quite know what happened, but the movie is inching toward telling us what happened, although we’ve already figured it out even if we don’t know the specific details. Also, I think the bird is just being a bird and doesn’t know how to be anything else.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Starling isn’t quite as dreadfully miscalculated, but it brings to mind another movie that Just. Doesn’t. Work. despite the cast doing what it can with a woeful screenplay, and that movie is the Kate Winslet Makes Pie In A Literal But Also Metaphorically Sexual Way With Josh Brolin movie Labor Day. What a dud that was. Yeesh. Somebody should combine the wannabe truthful/highly fictional cinematic universes of these two movies so a starling can be baked in that pie.

Performance Worth Watching: McCarthy can be extremely funny (Bridesmaids, The Heat, This is 40) and she can also be a strong dramatic actress (Can You Ever Forgive Me?). The Starling is neither funny nor strongly dramatic, but she doesn’t embarrass herself.

Memorable Dialogue: “What color is the sky in your world, Kemo Sabe?” — Timothy Olyphant, playing a man named Delp, says the type of line that we never wanted to hear Timothy Olyphant speak

Sex and Skin: None. TBBPITHBABTF: Too Busy Being Pegged In The Head By A Bird To F—.

Our Take: There’s a general empathetic ache we feel when we watch a movie about parents trying to put their lives back together after their child has died. The Starling certainly tries to evoke that pain, but I sometimes wondered if the movie wanted just as much to evoke a desire to eat a specific brand of snack cake. Here and there, McCarthy and O’Dowd participate in one-on-one scenes where they actually sound like human beings talking to each other, and the film stumbles upon a little bit of truth and honesty. But those moments are fleeting, because this movie is mostly misguided, manipulative, phony, sentimental schlock.

In order to get to those bits of sincerity, the film asks far too much from us. We have to work through hammer-to-the-skull symbolism, towering haystacks of phony dialogue, excruciatingly predictable story beats, imprudent slapstick, wacky supporting characters and other sundry heavily manufactured movie constructs. It’s hard to take the characters’ problems seriously when there’s so much capital-Q Quirk blocking us from getting into the emotional end zone. And the soundtrack — oy vey. In case you’re not feeling sad enough — and you won’t be, and you’ll never be — bathos-sopped songs by Brandi Carlisle, Nate Ruess and the Lumineers persistently elbow their way into the narrative like they’re cutting the line at Starbucks. This syrupy pap makes Sarah MacLachlan sound like Judas Priest. Those f—ing songs. Hearing them is akin to having your ears cudgeled with a shillelagh. I did not care for them.

By the way, did you know that starlings are monogamous? They stick together, building their nests out of packaging from specific brands of nutrition bars and any discarded socks that used to belong to a baby who died, doing whatever they can to keep their children safe. There’s a sequence in this movie where McCarthy — quite improbably, mind you — pegs one with a rock, then feels terrible about it and spends night after night nursing it back to health, and it’s a ruthless montage buoyed by music that’s best described as interminably Caucasian. Such is the movie, in a tidy little starling eggshell. It’s so bogus, it all but asks us to swallow a Sherman tank.

Our Call: SKIP IT. The Starling’s message is, we have to work really hard to accept the way things are. But sometimes, a person can avoid stepping in shit in order to avoid having to scrape it off your shoes, and yes, that’s a metaphor for watching this movie. Or not watching it, actually.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Starling on Netflix