Why The Starling's depiction of grief and mental health doesn't work

On September 25th of this year, Netflix released the Melissa McCarthy-starring, Theodore Melfi-directed The Starling, a movie about a woman’s recovery from grief and mental anguish after the sudden death of her child and her husband’s institutionalisation. It was aiming for high Oscar-bait territory, similar to films like The Goldfinch, Hillbilly Elegy and The Reader, and didn’t land well with critics, who called it manipulative, unrealistic and terrible.

Being a fan of McCarthy’s dramatic work in films like Can You Ever Forgive Me, and Ted Melfi’s previous film Hidden Figures, I was expecting an entertaining and uplifting film about grief and mental health. What I got was as shallow and manipulative as the critics predicted, and in particular, the depiction of grief and mental health stood out to me as underdeveloped and disrespectful.

So here’s why The Starling’s depiction of mental health struggles doesn’t work…

There are too many side characters who draw attention from the main story.

The Starling strikingly reminded me of Tim Burton’s mind-numbing adaptation of the young adult novel Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children (which coincidentally also had Chris O’Dowd in second billing). That movie was overflowing with A-list actors and random characters given minute-long parts and pulling the audience out of the picture, and combined with a long list of children and villains to establish, nobody was ultimately developed enough to care about.

Exactly, Timothy.

In this movie, focus is often pulled away to cut to scenes where McCarthy spouts meaningless dialogue with Timothy Olyphant, Daveed Diggs and several other actors whose parts in The Starling could be completely removed. By the time the movie gets back to its main plotline about grief and suffering, you’re still reeling from why Timothy Olyphant was in this movie with THAT haircut, or why this scene was necessary in the movie, or why was that guy there. Therefore, no development.

The movie’s editing removes huge chunks of its own timeline and several key moments.

It’s rare to say this, but The Starling really needed a few montages. The movie takes place over the course of several months, but the way the movie is edited makes it barely feel like a single week has passed. Key to this is The Starling’s overreliance on dialogue to describe passage of time, rather than actually showing the audience McCarthy’s battle with a dick bird that moved into her yard.

By the audience perspective, it appears that one bird has taken refuge and has barely even tried to annoy McCarthy over three months, but the movie fails to communicate that this bird has been frequently viciously attacking her, as she removes her lawn, replants a garden and experiences frequent continuity errors. The floatiness of the film’s timeline means that the audience can’t grasp any real kind of progress in the narrative, and therefore can’t connect with the depiction of grief.

The excessive symbolism makes the audience feel condescended to (and is sometimes unintentionally funny)

This movie’s symbolism reaches meme levels at points. When Bojack Horseman did a parody of a motivational speech that said “this voice is a metaphor. Everything is a metaphor!”, it was written in prophetic terms for this movie.

This bird is a metaphor.

The bird is a symbol of the grief she must live with. Her new vegetable garden is her new life after her daughter’s death. The recliner chair she gives away is the memory of her daughter, whom she is letting go. The snowball candies her husband eats are his memories of his happy wife. The spiral she takes on the road is the spiral of her existence. Timothy Olyphant’s haircut is a metaphor for Timothy Olyphant’s haircut.

The unnatural way in which Melfi sets up many of these metaphors is not only aggravatingly obvious, but also often awkward enough that the film becomes unintentionally funny. When we see Chris O’Dowd holding a handful of suicide pulls before suddenly pulling out a large amount of Snowball candies, our thoughts are not grief and sympathy but “holy shit…is he going to commit suicide by Snowball overdose?!”. So we drown in peals of laughter, ignoring whatever Melfi wants us to think of these symbols.

Ted Melfi’s awkward direction makes everything feel staged, creepy or irrelevant.

The Starling isn’t as badly directed as some films I’ve seen this year (see Cinderella, Things Heard and Seen, or Black Island for that matter), but it’s pretty bad nonetheless. Artificial and tonally flat, Melfi’s direction results in a film without any real sense of immersion, as the few scenes of intentional comedy pair awkwardly with the serious tone of the rest of the film.

Every scene feels floaty and irrelevant, in large part due to the editing that makes the movie’s timeline so confusing, but also due to a lack of interesting cinematography and an overfocus on the eponymous bird, made from very dated CGI.

Melfi’s attempts at layered storytelling are often overshadowed by his weird lack of consistent tone, as scenes skip from sad to comedic to angry to creepy with no real sense of continuity. All of it combines in a sense of laissez-faire that makes us want to fall asleep, instead of engaging us with the characters and the unconvincing portrayal of grief throughout.

You may be wondering why I haven’t directly discussed how mental health is depicted in The Starling, but danced around it with discussions of filmmaking. It’s important to note the atmosphere and feeling of a film contribute significantly to the audience’s willingness to absorb a film, to live in it. This means that content of themes come secondary to delivery.

So let’s address that content…

Grief is solved by berating a mentally ill man who recently re-lived the death of his daughter.

Imagine the Mendoza scene from The Simpsons if it played out like this:

Damn, damn, damn…McBain, I’m not gonna make it.

Oh, stop talkin’ crai-zy [AT LOUDEST PITCHED VOICE].

(Magic whorp sound) Okay.

That’s all the insight this movie has to offer. It’s kind of offensive to imply that grief can be overridden by just yelling at people, which has often been the inverse of the truth in many instances. That’s how The Starling ultimately fails as commentary, aided by the airy, awkward filmmaking surrounding it.

If you need to watch a real movie about grief, check out Nomadland. Or Bojack Horseman. Or The Last of Us. Or anything else.

Anyway, have you seen The Starling? If so, what did you think about it? Leave your answers in the comments below.