Anti-science satire funny because it’s true
“Don’t Look Up” might be the funniest movie of 2021. It’s definitely the most depressing, and that odd combination makes for a one-of-a-kind experience. Writer-director Adam Mckay (“The Big Short”) gives you over two hours of laughs while convincing you that the world is coming to an end.
The movie is a satire that targets anti-science, anti-intellectual and anti-logic Americans who are gullible in the extreme and brainwashed by social media. Mckay’s humor is so pointed and dead-on here that it’s bracing. You almost feel like this is a movie that might change things. People might see this and realize … but no. As Mckay knows, he’s lampooning a segment of the public that is beyond the reach of satire.
The story is remarkably prescient, in that it plays like a parable about the pandemic, even though the concept was announced in the media well ahead of COVID and originally scheduled to go before the cameras in April 2020. Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo Dicaprio play a pair of astronomers who discover that a huge comet is going to crash into the Earth in six months, wiping out all forms of life on the planet. They assume that that scientific certainty will rouse the government and the people into emergency action. They assume wrong.
If only Morgan Freeman were president. He knew what to do in “Deep Impact.” But, no, this time it’s Meryl Streep in the Oval Office, and she’s an incompetent demagogue. Jonah Hill plays her smug idiot son, who is also her chief of staff, a case of nepotism that a half-dozen years ago would have been considered inconceivable.
Essentially, Mckay presents a Cassandra-like situation, in which the two scientists know exactly what’s going to happen, but they can’t get enough people in power to do something about it. In the hands of another filmmaker, that might not be enough to fill a 145-minute movie. But Mckay devises lots of turns and surprises and introduces various characters, such as an eccentric Elon Musk-like billionaire (Mark Rylance) with his own privatesector solution to the crisis.
Mckay’s screenplay ideally combines rigor with freedom and inspiration. He knows going in that he has criticisms to make of TV news, newspapers, social media, government and business — all very specific and accurate — and yet “Don’t Look Up” never feels on-the-nose or programmatic. His main characters, the everhopeful Randall (Dicaprio) and the realistic Kate (Lawrence), remain people, not concepts, and the movie stays playful, with touches of absurd humor, as when Kate keeps speculating about a general who swindled $20 from her.
Often, Mckay is most funny in presenting what is most horrible — for example, the morning TV show, hosted by a pair of lightweights (Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry) who insist on keeping it upbeat, even when a scientist tells them the world is going to end in six months. Such is television that the fate of the world depends not on the facts that Dicaprio’s astronomer presents, but on his ability to communicate through a camera.
Mckay captures the precise tone and cadence of modern-day stupidity, as when the president, riding a populist wave of science deniers, tells a crowd, “They want you to be afraid. They want you to look up so they can look down on you!” On the other side, there’s a vapid pop star (played by Ariana Grande) singing a nonsense power ballad telling people to “look up.”
Mckay even finds time to skewer the vanity of self-styled reasonable people who think that finding a middle position between rationality and starkraving lunacy represents moderation.
Some people would much rather blow up than admit they were wrong. That’s what Mckay is saying, and when he wrote the screenplay two years ago, he probably thought he was exaggerating. Now, extreme though it may be, “Don’t Look Up” looks like a close portrait of contemporary America.
Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes
Rating: R (strong language, sexual content throughout, graphic nudity, drug content). mlasalle@sfchronicle.com