Josh Reviews Mr. Harrigan’s Phone

I recently bought and read If it Bleeds, a collection of four novellas by Stephen King, because I knew I wanted to see the movie The Life of Chuck, and I wanted to read the original story first.  (I’m glad I did; I enjoyed both the story and the movie adaptation.)  The first story in the novella was called Mr. Harrigan’s Phone.  I was surprised to discover that had also been adapted into a movie.  I’d never heard of it before, but the movie was made for Netflix back in 2022, written and directed by John Lee Hancock (who has directed a number of notable films, including The Rookie, The Alamo, The Blind Side, and Saving Mr. Banks), and starring Donald Sutherland!  Wow!

I really enjoyed the novella, so I was eager to watch the film adaptation.  But I’ll admit that I didn’t have high hopes going in.  A Netflix adaptation I’d never heard of?  Was there any way this could be good?  I had a suspicion that they’d cranked up the supernatural elements to turn this lovely story into a more cliche horror film.

Luckily, that’s not the case at all!  This film is great.  Like The Like of Chuck, it is surprisingly and impressively faithful to Mr. King’s novella.  They made very few changes to the original story.  What a rarity in Hollywood — they trusted the source material!!

I don’t want to tell you too much about the story.  I’ll say that it’s set in 2003, in the early days of smart phones.  Craig Poole is a young kid in a small town in Maine.  His mom has passed away, and he’s being raised by his dad.  Craig gets hired by the wealthy and elderly Mr. Harrigan — a finance tycoon who has retired to this small town where he can live well and people won’t bother him.  Craig does some odd jobs around Mr. Harrigan’s large house, but his main job is to read to him three days a week (which Mr. Harrigan needs because his eyes are failing).  Gradually, a bond forms between the two.  Mr. Harrigan has a habit of sending Craig a lotto card four times a year, along with a card for that corresponding holiday.  One of those lotto card is a winner, for several thousand dollars.  As a thank-you gift, Craig decides to but Mr. Harrigan his first cell-phone.  Mr. Harrigan is resistant at first, but eventually (like everyone else on the planet), he gets hooked by the possibilities the phone allows him.  That phone eventually winds up becoming a powerful point of connection between the two…

Like The Life of Chuck and, in my opinion, most of the best works of Stephen King, there is a supernatural component to the story, but it’s secondary to the development of the characters.  I was worried they’d rush the supernatural stuff in this movie adaptation, but thankfully they don’t.  The films allows the story to take its time.  The supernatural element doesn’t enter the film into quite late in the movie, actually.  I’m glad they had the bravery to be patient with the storytelling.  The story works because the film has taken its time to establish the situation and the characters.  We need to connect with Craig and with Mr. Harrigan, and the unlikely bond that forms between the two of them.  That makes the supernatural stuff, when it arrives, land with more power.  (I was also worried they’d add in a lot of horror-movie scares and gore, but here again, the filmmakers demonstrated admirable restraint.  Some bad stuff happens in the film’s second half, but it mostly happens off-screen.  This is far more of a drama than a horror movie.  I liked that!!)

The cast is terrific.  Donald Sutherland (in one of his final film roles!) retains all of his dramatic power.  He’s perfect casting for Mr. Harrigan.  We can see the steel behind this elderly man; why he was a fearsome force on Wall Street, and why he might at first be off-putting or strange to a little kid.  Mr. Sutherland also plays his scenes with just the right gleam in his eye, so that we can understand why Craig (unlike most others Mr. Harrigan’s life) eventually softens to him.

They wisely cast two actors to play Craig, to allow the story to take place convincingly over several years, just as it does in the novella.  (Again, what a great choice to be faithful to the original story!!  Most Hollywood films would have condensed the time-frame to allow one young actor to play the role throughout; but it’s important to the story that Craig & Mr. Harrigan’s relationship slowly develops over the course of many years.)  Colin O’Brien plays young Craig, and then he passes the role, for the bulk of the movie, to Jaeden Martell.  Mr. Martell is a wonderful young actor who has been great in many previous films, including Midnight Special… and most notably he played Bill Denbrough in the two-film adaptation of Stephen King’s It!  It’s great fun seeing Mr. Martell back in another Stephen King adaptation!  He does a great job at portraying a young, intelligent, might-become-a-writer-someday Stephen King protagonist!

The great Kirby Howell-Baptiste (The Good Place, Sandman) is perfect as a young teacher, Ms. Hart, who has a strong influence on Craig.  (It’s fascinating to see the themes running through both this story and The Life of Chuck, which also features a school bully and not one but two female teachers who have a powerful impact on the main character.)  We need to like Ms. Hart right away, as Craig does, and Ms. Howell-Baptiste’s charisma and wonderful smile seals the deal with the audience immediately and effectively.  Joe Tippett (Mare of Easttown) is great as Craig’s dad, who loves his son but isn’t always sure how to navigate his own grief to be the best parent he could/should be.  Cyrus Arnold is terrific as Kenny Yankovich, another classic Stephen King child-bully character.  Daniel Reece is perfect as the rich, entitled Deane Whitmore.  (By the way, watching the movie I was sure that the casting of Deane represented an It movie reunion, but turns out I was confusing Daniel Reece with James Ransone, who played grown-up Eddie Kaspbrak in It Chapter Two.  I was wrong, though wow, the two men really do resemble one another!)

I’ve commented several times how faithful this film was to the source material.  Having just read the original novella, my ears caught and appreciated that they had young Chuck mispronounce “Ashkelon” as ass-kelon when reading from the Bible in Church; though they skipped the follow-up scene in which Mr. Harrigan comments about it.  I guess that was on the cutting room floor…!

Mr. Harrigan’s Phone is a pleasingly patient, compelling coming-of-age story, meant for grown-ups.  This is a small-scale story.  I assume this film was made for a low budget, and there’s not too much “movie-exciting” stuff added into the adaptation.  That’s fine by me.  I’m glad to have seen this.  Don’t go in expecting big-budget spectacle.  As a small-scale story, this is worth your time.

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