Mixed messaging

I tend to enjoy David O. Russell's films. Three Kings, The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle; all good stuff. So when I saw the trailers for what looked like a rather quirky story loaded with talented actors and then later learned it was based on the Business Plot, I was instantly intrigued. And then I noticed the average rating on Rotten Tomatoes... I generally don't care about fan ratings, as we can see how those can be manipulated by man-sized toddlers not wanting their fantasy universes to be even more fantastic than they're comfortable with. But when an accumulator like RT is showing something in the range of 31% approval from critics, it's a concern. Accumulators tend to progress toward the mean, so a rating that's well above 50% is usually an indication of genuine quality, while one that far below is usually an indication of something pretty poor. But then our friend, Leigh, appeared in one of my brief excursions on Facebook urging people to see the film. Leigh and her husband, David, are regular filmgoers and volunteers at the theaters and film festivals in Traverse City, so that's an opinion that will carry some weight with me. So when Tuesday night rolled around, we headed to the State Theater, hoping to not be disappointed. We walked out with a relatively positive shrug of the shoulders. It was decent.

I tend to like my message films with a bit more subtlety than what seems to be the modern trend. I felt like Don't Look Up was constantly beating you over the head about the threat of global warming and the concerted efforts to either ignore it or cover it up. Of course, if there's one thing you might really take the time out to be concerned about, it's that environmental crisis, as Hurricane Ian aptly reminded everyone of once again (as the regular flooding of Miami Beach should do the same.) Similarly, Amsterdam is warning about the the same threat of money-fueled fascism today that drove the Business Plot in the 1930s. That, too, is something to be regularly concerned about, not just in the US but in many places around the world, as the ownership class continues to accumulate more wealth and, thus, more power. It's good to have cultural warnings like this because the more people talk about this threat, the more exposed it remains and the more people will be ready to confront it as the actual problem that it is. But the contrast with Don't Look Up in this film was that, instead of constantly yelling at you, it submerged its message in an elaborate whodunnit until the final act when it switched tacks to Christian Bale narrating the meaning of the whole story while Robert DeNiro kept providing public service messages to the audience. They even ran his speech alongside the speech by Smedley Butler at the Congressional hearings on the Business Plot in 1933 during the credits just in case you somehow didn't get the point and/or had fallen asleep for the last third of the movie.

The cast overall did really well. The three leads (Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, and John David Washington) all were on their game, with Bale at his quirky best, Washington the absurdly implacable stone wall for him to bounce off of, and Robbie carrying the emotional discourse for the three of them. I thought the biggest treat was Anya Taylor-Joy, as she totally filled the part of the mildly outraged bystander cum conspirator who acts well-meaning when its really about covering their tracks. Likewise, Michael Shannon and Mike Myers were excellent as the birdwatching spies. I also really liked Zaldaña as the winsome medical examiner who's among the most Wes Anderson elements of the story. And that's what was kind of odd. In contrast to most of his other films, where it was clear what the style intent was from the beginning, it really felt like Russell was, in addition to hammering the message home, trying to surround it with a story akin to Anderson's usual approach and kind of missing the charm that makes the latter's films really work. The pace was a bit too hectic and the characters spent too much time explaining themselves, either to each other or to the audience, instead of just carrying on with the behaviors that should've been perfectly natural to them as part of their identities within this semi-absurdist world. I appreciate Russell trying something different and I think he was aiming for something along the lines of the The Great Dictator and he kind of got there, but not without me thinking that he could've gone harder in one direction or the other and been more successful in delivering the message that he wanted to get across. Again, I think it's a worthwhile message and more people need to pay attention to it, but they might be better served by paying that attention to what's actually happening right now, rather than what happened almost 100 years ago, no matter how comparable the two eras are. Not a bad film, but not one I'd call required viewing, either.