WISH FULFILMENT
‘Malcolm & Marie’ is a requiem to a dying love that’s a booby trap for film critics, says Clarisse Loughrey. And while Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek’s sci-fi is a jumble of ideas, Gerard Butler’s new disaster film is surprisingly scary
Malcolm & Marie
Dir: Sam Levinson. Starring: Zendaya, John David Washington. 15, 106 mins
Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie feels like a booby trap for film critics. It follows a couple. One is an upand-coming director named Malcolm (John David Washington), returning to a rented, modernist house in Malibu after the premiere of his new film. He’s high off the praise. The other, his date and long-time girlfriend Marie (Zendaya) is a lapsed actor whose experiences with drug addiction may have inspired this
newly hailed masterwork.
Malcolm is a one-man fireworks show – all ego and youthful promise, funnelled into a stream of furious consciousness. The critics never liked his earlier work, so their fresh adulation has left him with a private bitterness. When he receives a (positive) review from the “white girl from the LA Times”, that bitterness explodes into delirium. She suggests one of his characters “brilliantly subverts the white-saviour trope” – he’s convinced that, if he were a white man, she would have said the opposite. Critics, in his eyes, read the identity of the filmmaker first, the content of their film second.
His monologue, delivered to no one in particular, is the bait. Levinson, who also wrote the film’s script, is white – he created HBO’s much-applauded Euphoria and his father, Barry, directed Rain Man. Does he have a right to speak through Black characters in such a way? Or does leveraging that criticism ignore a point Marie offers later on, that film is an entirely collaborative effort? After all, Zendaya, one of Euphoria’s main stars, was heavily involved in both the film’s conception and its writing. She’s one of its producers, alongside Washington.
Malcolm points out the coded, racial aspect to his film being labelled as “jazzy”, while an actual jazz score by Labrinth twinkles away in the background. Cinematographer Marcell Rév’s use of sumptuous black and white, all shot on 35mm film, begs direct comparison with classics such as John Cassavetes’s Faces or Mike Nichols’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. Malcolm & Marie teasingly invites categorisation as a highconcept prank pulled off by a creative team bored in lockdown (the film was shot last year with a crew of 22). But the real ruse is that any critic too incensed by the film’s insults risks looking as solipsistic as Malcolm himself. It’s so devilishly provocative that it’s impressive.
As Marie notes, his failings as a partner and a filmmaker are one and the same. Malcolm & Marie isn’t just a meditation on modern filmmaking – it’s a spiky, luxuriant portrait of a relationship that can no longer sustain itself, where one partner is a suffocating egotist and the other has too many wounds left unhealed. The catalyst for a marathon argument is an act of carelessness: Malcolm forgot to thank Marie during his speech. She thinks it’s because he can’t bear to share the spotlight with someone whose voice is so present in the film.
The thrill of Malcolm & Marie is in how the characters are given space to be fair and ugly in equal measure – sometimes absurd, in the way such self-consuming arguments tend to be. She calls him “an emotional terrorist” with a straight face; he descends into hysteria when he can’t find his wallet. The sudden, humbled silence that follows suggests it was in his pocket all along.
Washington and Zendaya treat these emotional cycles – the silence, the screaming, the tears, the sex – as a kind of toxic tango. He’s the slick movie star we saw in Tenet, shimmying around the living room to James Brown’s “Down and Out in New York City”, but with an impatient child screaming out for attention underneath. Zendaya, her voice mellow and detached, trades in quiet devastations: a bitter laugh here, a crumpled brow there. There’s a specific way she throws her head back, chin raised high, that makes it feel like Marie is in a constant battle to preserve her pride.
Early on in the film, she warns: “I promise you, nothing productive is going to be said tonight.” Malcolm & Marie offers the distinct pleasure of revelling in someone else’s pain and passions, all hot air and heady fatalism. It’s the requiem of a love at death’s door.
Too much happiness can kill you
Bliss
Dir: Mike Cahill. Starring: Owen Wilson, Salma Hayek, Madeline Zima, Nesta Cooper, Joshua Leonard. 103 mins
Director Mike Cahill thrives on discomfort. His sci-fi visions have always relied on an element of confrontation – what it would be like to cross paths with a perfect double or unlock the secrets of reincarnation by looking into another’s eyes, as tackled in 2011’s Another Earth and 2014’s I Origins. But the scale of his ambition sometimes overruns the practicality of his budget or the logic of his script, so that his work is less a pleasing headscratcher, more a jumble sale of ideas. Bliss, unfortunately, sees Cahill succumb entirely to this impulse.
He commits to creating a rich, expansive world, then fails to find anything meaningful within it. Greg (Owen Wilson), sat in his office, whiles away the hours drawing Mediterranean vistas that are, in his mind, concretely real. “It has a feeling and the feeling’s real,” he assures himself. There’s a woman in some of the drawings – one day, suddenly, she careens into his life.
Isabel (Salma Hayek), who’s inexplicably dressed like Helena Bonham Carter, insists that she and Greg are one of the few real people in this world. Everything else is an illusion. Right before he dismisses her as nothing but a harmless kook, she shows him that, with a flick of the wrist, she can manipulate both people and objects. Isabel is part-superhero out of spandex, part-manic pixie dream girl, part-Morpheus from The Matrix. From there, the two of them start a rampage across the city, convinced that there are no consequences and no victims.
There’s a fleeting pleasure in Greg and Isabel’s days of anarchy. Wilson suits the role perfectly, since he’s always had a skill for creating characters that act like excitable puppies suddenly hit by the weight of the world. He’ll jauntily skip through his lines, always reacting with a trademark “wow” when Greg discovers something new and magical. But the rest of him – his expressions and body – have a drooping weight to them that suggest Greg feels lost, instead of eagerly surrendering to the unknown.
But Bliss flounders any time it tries to be profound – even if scientist Bill Nye and philosopher Slavoj Zizek make brief cameos, creating a smokescreen of intellectual clout. It struggles to deliver with clarity what it exactly it wants to be about, or the questions it wants to ask of its audience. We also follow the lives of Greg’s two neglected children, Arthur (Jorge Lendeborg Jr) and Emily (Nesta Cooper). But Cahill’s script never tackles the obvious question: if Greg’s children don’t exist beyond his imagination or the codes of some computer programme, then why care about their future? What have they risked? What weight does their pain have?
Near its end, Bliss appears to suggest there’s a real chance that, if we do too much good and change too many things, we might become too happy. How could that possibly be anyone’s real concern?
Not a total disaster
Greenland
Dir: Ric Roman Waugh. Starring: Gerard Butler, Morena Baccarin, Roger Dale Floyd, Scott Glenn, David Denman, Hope Davis. 15, 119 mins
Greenland, the latest in Gerard Butler’s ever-expanding oeuvre of action films, is full of surprises. The first one arrives when the actor – in the role of grizzled Atlanta-based engineer John Garrity – opens his mouth, only for his natural Scottish burr to slip out. It’s hard to think of the last time Butler wasn’t forced to adopt a hardened American twang for one of these films. The moment is so unexpected, it might make you jump.
The second one is that director Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland is utterly unlike the Butler vehicles we’re used to – all the jingoistic bombast of Geostorm or Olympus Has Fallen is nowhere to be seen. This is a disaster film laced with a palpable sense of fear, though it comes in the guise of something mildly absurd. John, recently separated from his wife, Allison (Morena Baccarin), is returning home to host a birthday party for his seven-year-old son Nathan (Roger Dale Floyd). The boy, however, seems distracted by news that a comet, affectionately termed Clarke, is about to pass by Earth, with a single fragment expected to crash land somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. Nathan, his friends, and their parents all gather around the TV, all beaming with scientific curiosity, only for the news anchors to solemnly declare that the scientists were wrong in their calculations. Cut to a shot of Tampa, Florida, burnt to a crisp.
That explains the mysterious phone call John received from Homeland Security, asking him and his family to stand by for instructions. They’ve been specially selected for evacuation to an old Cold War bunker – the location of which is supposedly top secret, despite being the title of the film. Not only will more fragments soon rain down on Earth’s population, but a nine-mile-wide chunk, termed a “planet killer”, is predicted to wipe out western Europe in the next 48 hours and trigger an extinction-level-event.
Roland Emmerich – who gave us Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012 – continues to cast a gargantuan shadow over the genre. With it comes certain expectations, and so Greenland begrudgingly shows us images of global destruction, including a hollowed-out Sydney Opera House and a flaccid Eiffel Tower. But its limited budget – $35m versus Geostorm’s $120m – means Chris Sparling’s script must home in on the family’s more intimate, eerily believable struggles. There’s a missing pack of insulin (Nathan is diabetic) and a whole lot of fuss about doomsday bureaucracy.
Unsurprisingly, the family’s plans to evacuate, don’t go to plan. They scream at wearied officials, then get separated, endangered, and swallowed up in the chaos – all while the camera tries desperately to keep up with them, as they push through crowds and weave between the miles of traffic-jammed cars. Baccarin’s
emotional commitment is impressive, as she tries to act both as parent and rescuer to her son, with no time to process the unfathomable. And Butler, though he wears these roles now like an old coat, still allows flashes of vulnerability to peek out from behind the starry veneer.
Greenland isn’t revolutionary – it’s still let down by that myopic sense that every victory for our heroes is a victory for humanity, even as newscasters reel off the capital cities obliterated off the map. While Waugh couldn’t quite rescue Butler’s last film, Angel Has Fallen, from the violent ugliness of its franchise, he at least injected it with a little self-awareness. He’s more successful here, making Greenland, shot in 2019, a fitting film for the era. Why be so flippant about global disaster when those ideas now feel so close to home?