“The melancholy unity between the living and the dead,” James Joyce
Finally, a film that gives the cellphone its due: Mr. Harrigan’s Phone has an old man (Donald Sutherland) with a new smart-phone (it is the early 80’s) to stay with him even after he’s buried. Needless to say, he loves it—from stock reports (he is a billionaire) to carrying on after he permanently resides underground.
It's vintage Stephen King: New England small town, small school with bullies, to a young boy, Craig (Jaedan Martell—in the style of Timothy Chalamet) facing down bullies and forming an attachment to eccentric, aging billionaire, Mr. Harrigan. The boy reads regularly as a job to the old man, who has vision problems, great works of literature, some like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, revealing King’s nihilist leanings toward his inferior fellow man.
That’s the first hour, in which writer/director John Lee Hancock lets us languish in some cliched interchanges between generations, although slightly different this time as Harrigan clarifies his recipe for success, mostly walking all over his enemies, or possibly killing them, if that could be true. What is true is that he is a successful captain of industry, moving to a small Maine town to avoid people, and meeting a young man of integrity and a modicum of grit.
Besides the creepy control Mr. Harrigan has over his enemies, Hancock, not an expert at creating tension or spine-tingling thrills, shows an interest in paternal and maternal influences over the young man. After his mother died at an early age, Craig shows an abiding sorrow, but not as much as his dad (Joe Tippett) does, leaving us to witness his son’s growing distance from his weak father and finding Harrigan a suitable substitute. Craig seems also to find a maternal substitute in the school’s best teacher, Ms. Hart (Kirby Howell-Baptiste). The story stands on its own as a mild deconstruction of any teen’s coming to age after loss.
As a low-key Netflix supernatural thriller—no jump scares or stupid, scary moves into basements, for instance--Mr. Harrigan’s phone is an object lesson in the use and abuse of smart phones and the compromising situations our fallible humanity gets us in. As we watch teens become absorbed to distraction with the new toy, a Stephen King novella adaptation once again captures our human penchant for the obsessive.
Yet, that means even those who don’t much like the genre can enjoy Mr. Harrigan’s Phone at a low-level of intensity and the marvelous Donald Sutherland at the same time.
Mr. Harrigan’s Phone
Director: John Lee Hancock (The Highwaymen)
Screenplay: Hancock, from Stephen King novella
Cast: Donald Sutherland (The Dirty Dozen)
Run Time: 1h 44m
Rating: PG-13
On Netflix
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
