Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
Three stories in one film from Yorgos Lanthimos, and the first one is a stone-cold classic: Jesse Plemons plays Robert, the employee of a wealthy businessman (Willem Dafoe), but his employment goes well beyond the norm. Every action he takes must be approved by and reported to the boss, from what he eats in the morning to how often he fucks his wife (Hong Chau). When Robert finally balks at an order to ram his car into another car—likely to injure Robert, and potentially kill the other driver, who also under Dafoe's influence—his life unravels and his privileged position in Dafoe's organization is taken away.
This creepy and unexplained situation is firmly in line with Lanthimos's weirder movies (co-screenwriter Efthimis Filippou worked with him on Dogtooth and The Lobster, among other titles), and although its concept invites interpretation, it seems almost a shame to do so. Still: On the one hand this segment reads as a parable about the way we live today or something, corporate culture and our willingness to sell our individuality, etc. etc., which goes along with the Twilight Zone vibe of the movie. But it's more bracing to think of it as a dirge for how people need God, that implacably cruel deity who lets us know how we should be behaving. The distance between that lofty subject and the story's zaniness is a fitting, even exhilarating, way to goose a big topic into unpredictable life.
The other two stories, about a lost wife (Emma Stone) returning to a suspicious husband (Plemons), and religious cultists (Stone and Plemons again) seeking a sacrificial figure, are not at the same level. (The main actors appear in each segment, and include Margaret Qualley and Mamoudou Athie.) But Kinds of Kindness is freakily enjoyable, a vision of a cruel world rendered in oblique strokes, its humor erupting in gasps. Somehow it feels a little offhanded; there's no special force to the way Lanthimos and cinematographer Robbie Ryan see this world—the wildly stylized vistas of Poor Things have given way to a more workmanlike style. I get that this plainer mode throws the utter craziness of the subject matter into a "what if this were the everyday reality?" kind of vein, but at 164 minutes it also wears thin.
Lanthimos's best films have a quality of endlessly unfolding; it's not merely that they keep getting stranger, but that each imaginative wave causes a new ripple to issue forth. (And with his lesser films—I would say Killing of a Sacred Deer qualifies—those ideas feel over-cooked and stunted.) We see examples of the best and the lesser in this movie, but at least it's not like anything else you've seen. By the way, stick around for the end credits. I happened to see this movie at a New York City critics screening (not my usual stomping grounds), and more than half the group had bolted by the time a mid-credits scene appeared, rounding out an amusing running joke—but not an irrelevant one.
June 28, 2024
