THE LOBSTER, dir. Yorgos Lanthimos
Imagine a world where if you end up alone, the state turns you into an animal. If you’re in a relationship that falls apart, or if you're encroaching on a certain age, they send you to a singles retreat in the woods in a sort of last-ditch effort to pair you off with someone. If you don’t meet anyone compatible in the time allotted (roughly a month), they take you into the SURGERY ROOM and perform a procedure on you where you end up living the rest of your life as an animal of your choosing (your organs and blood are donated to hospitals). Each day, you are granted an opportunity to extend your time in the clinic by hunting down and tranquilizing the “loners” that have eschewed protocol and live in the surrounding woods. If you pair with someone, you are sent to a double room for two weeks, followed by a two week excursion on a locally parked yacht. If you experience difficulty with your spouse, or enter into an argument you cannot solve on your own, you may be assigned a child. “That usually helps.”
This is the world of THE LOBSTER, a very weird black comedy that is both tough to swallow and unlike anything you’ve seen before. Lanthimos’ film is like a mix of Wes Anderson and George Orwell, where the creeping paranoia everyone is plagued by doesn’t manage to phase their deadpan inexpressiveness. The humor is derived from such subjects as failed suicide attempts, savagely murdering animals, speech impediments, hollow friendship, jealousy, and dying cold, alone, and unloved in your middle age. Breezy as they come.
The story centers around David, played by an overweight, mustachioed Colin Farrell, who also speaks in his native Irish accent. At the opening, the narrator (Rachel Weisz) tells us that David has just gotten out of a long-term relationship as we see him board a bus headed for the clinic in the woods. There, David chums up with two fellow singles, played by Ben Whishaw and a lisping John C. Reilly. Each seems to have different chances at pairing up with a female (you can enter yourself as a homosexual, if you’re so inclined, but not a bisexual); Whishaw seems willing to do whatever it takes (including repeatedly smashing his head against fixed objects) to find his match, David is resisting his natural mate (a cold, bitchy woman played by Lanthimos regular Angeliki Papoulia), and Reilly…well, Reilly’s probably turning into an animal. David finally relents and hits on Papoulia, who initially accepts and succumbs to his advances, but soon does something unspeakable to his dog. David freaks out and escapes the hotel and into the woods, where he meets characters played by Lea Seydoux, Michael Smiley, and finally, Weisz, who becomes an important figure in his life.
Without getting too into the specifics of where the plot goes, I’ll say that the first half, with Farrell, Whishaw, and Reilly in the clinic (which is led by a smiley, all-business Olivia Colman) plays almost like a straight comedy. Not only are we laughing at the oddball, drab, merciless world that is being presented to us, but there’s punchlines, gags, and payoffs so extreme you can’t help but chuckle (a CPR demonstration is funny on its own, but invisibly serves to set up a great, plot-advancing joke later on). The characters are all like Data with their emotion chip turned off, and are almost mentally challenged in their naiveté and emotional deadness, which in turn makes them all seem very cruel, hostile, and alone. In the first half, we laugh at how hopeless these people are, and the various things this horrible system drives them to do to themselves and to one another, and the bizarro universe Lanthimos creates seems dangerous, unique, and kind of fascinating.
It’s when the film shifts and becomes something a little more serious, a little less BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and a little more SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK, that it started to lose me. Without the superficial trappings of the clinic, the universe of the film is basically distilled to the way these human beings interact, which becomes raw, disturbing, and painful in the bare sun away from the rituals and rules of the hotel. There’s a love story that is mildly cute, but is so dry and awkward that it doesn’t work comedically or emotionally. The jokes become fewer and far between, and seem more silly and perfunctory as a result, almost like Lanthimos knew things were getting too boring and resulted to bonkers moments that make no sense other than as laugh beats. I suppose you could say that most satires go through this if they are fully committed to their premise, and usually lose interest in the easy joke by about the halfway point. But I was never certain that Lanthimos was going after a subject in particular, but rather highlighting how the structure of society serves to keep us all apart emotionally while ironically encouraging us to stabilize, mate, and reproduce. Once the rules are in place, and we merely have to watch his characters cause each other harm while utterly failing to connect with one another, it loses its sly, comedic edge, and just becomes an exploration of this unique world the director has created.
A big part of what defines the world is the cast, easily the most famous Lanthimos has worked with thus far. Farrell, proving once again this year after TRUE DETECTIVE that he’s increasingly losing interest in playing the traditional handsome leading man, serves as an ideal lead for this story. Overweight, bespectacled, and mumbly, he’s the perfect example of this world’s version of an everyman, meaning someone so used to the apathy of existence that anything resembling a real emotion has a major, noticable impact on his behavior. Those eyes that used to dart back and forth rapidly now show the weathered defeat of middle age, and he struggles in pathetic scenarios (like putting balm on that impossible-to-reach spot on his back) with nary a hint of the ego one might expect from the former heartthrob. Rachel Weisz, in both her roles as narrator and co-star, perfectly acclimates to the tone of the piece, while male co-stars Whishaw and Reilly get in a healthy amount of laughs each. Whishaw’s fellow SPECTRE actor, Seydoux, emerges as sort of the villain of the piece, and she’s appropriately cold, menacing, and withdrawn; if anything, she’s so hateable and irredeemable in her role that she probably makes the latter section of the film even harder to watch than it would’ve otherwise been. Colman also deserves a shout-out for her hotel manager, a matter-of-factly, business-as-usual figure who is long past feeling sympathy for these souls who desperately cavort around in an attempt to avoid their fate, which she is always more than happy to relay the details of.
If THE LOBSTER was as enjoyable as it was unique, it’d be a tidy little masterpiece, but unfortunately, it isn’t even close. It is an even more hopeless and drab world than BRAZIL, but with buildings, cars, and cities that look exactly like our own, and without any shots as clever and alive as Gilliam’s iconic compositions. Every character is inherently unlikable, and their attempts at “happiness” are so futile and pathetic that we can only laugh at them, and feel nothing. Lanthimos scores big laughs early on, but they peter off, and we spend too much time watching Farrell and the other characters be miserable and lonely in the woods. With this cast and premise, and the dry, pitch-black humor at the outset, I was hoping this would be something original, provocative, and hilarious, but in the end, it only managed to be the first thing. Can’t say I didn’t laugh though.
WHERE TO INVADE NEXT, dir. Michael Moore
I think it’s safe to say that Michael Moore’s M.O. is criticizing institutional problems in the U.S. Whether it’s the downfall of the car industry in Detroit, the failure of gun control laws to supersede the efforts of the NRA lobby, the crimes of the Bush White House, the healthcare industry, and the lawlessness of the banks, he has always pointed his camera at us, our problems, our failures, and ultimately our hopes for the future. But what he’s done here is different; instead of focusing on our shortcomings, he’s traveled abroad to 10 or so countries to examine what they do better than us, under the guise of “invading”. Going from nation to nation with an American flag in his hand, he aims to take what’s best about each country, and once he figures it out, "plants" his flag (often on solid surfaces) and promises to take the idea back to America.
The breadth of Moore’s scope is awe-inspiring. He interviews everyone, from the working class to sitting and former presidents/prime ministers, to get a sense of what life is like in the various corners of the world he visits. He asks Italians about how their working class citizens have such high quality of life (in short: brief work days and a shit-ton of vacation time). He visits Finland and inquires into how they are rated number one in education (compared to USA at #23) despite of, or because of, their 3-hour school days and essentially homework-free curriculum. He goes to a middle-of-nowhere French school and marvels at their lunch menu, which is specifically balanced, healthy (the chef boasts that French Fries make it on the menu only twice a year; “I have never eaten a hamburger in my life”), and always, ALWAYS features a cheese dish (the kids’ reactions when Moore shows them pics of American lunches on his cell phone are priceless). He visits both minimum and maximum-security Norwegian prisons, which allow their inmates such amenities as personal televisions/computers, keys to their cells, and even the ability to run and bike freely outside instead of, as Moore calls it, “taking revenge” on its prisoners.
I’m of a generation that has grown incredibly disillusioned with the U.S. and it’s government policies, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. As the footage Moore implements makes plainly evident, we live in a culture where the widespread abuse and imprisonment of black americans is both widely known and mostly ignored, where educational programs have been whittled down to their bare essentials, and where pretty much everyone with a college education is mired in debt. Not counting those who took semesters abroad or what have you, I have friends who have exiled themselves and have taken up permanent residence in Canada, Israel, Costa Rica, Germany, and New Zealand, undoubtedly in part due to the hopelessness of achieving a peaceful, content middle-class life in this country. Those who have the option to leave but choose to stay here tend to do so with the hopes of working or scheming their way to to the top of their respective industries, fully aware that they are expected to compete at a cutthroat level with basically everyone who isn’t their family member in the hopes of maybe, possibly being let into the kingdom of financial solvency and cultural privilege.
I didn’t see these people in Moore’s film. “Get rich or die trying” is not a mantra (or record) you’ll likely hear in any of the towns/cities he visits. What he portrays are civilized, contented worlds where happiness and functionality, not material gain, are the goals to aspire to. Being healthy, being happy, and being a decent human being seem paramount above all things, notions which are foreign even in the supposedly idyllic Los Angeles where I reside. His subjects lack the snark, the knowingness, the inherent superiority of the vast majority of Americans (myself included), but rather cheerfully discuss their various philosophies and what they think the U.S. could do to improve our average quality of life. It is crazy to think about how often the policies of the American Government clash with the realities of day-to-day life as a normal citizen, and even crazier still when you realize how many other modern governments function so much better in that regard invisibly to our “America, Fuck Yeah!”-tinged eyes. You start to wish Moore really was bringing all this stuff back with him, instead of merely using them as bullet points in a documentary that will go completely ignored by at least half of the country. But alas…
The most interesting aspect of the various testimonials he gathers, which would have been even more effective if he didn’t linger on it for his closing statements, is how much these countries seem to take inspiration from American history and ideals. A prosecutor known for laying the hammer down on criminal Icelandic banks cites the Savings and Loan scandals for inspiring him to take action against their malfeasance. When Moore asks about why the Norwegian prisons are so lax with their inmates, the officials mention that prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishment” is in our Constitution, not theirs. And that working class Italian couple, who vacation regularly in Africa, the U.S., and Asia on their factory-worker salaries, state plainly that it’s everyone’s goal to end up moving to America (when Moore tells them how many legally mandated vacation days American get, specifically NONE, they start to reconsider). It's helps to provide commentary not just on what we think of them, but what many others around the world think of us, and how little we measure up to our massive worldwide reputation.
Moore ends his movie on a hopeful note, using the examples of the Berlin Wall and laws against same-sex marriage as things he thought would never break, but eventually did. Perhaps I haven’t lived long enough, but I’m more cynical; as a Tunisian woman Moore speaks to mentions, Americans tend not to look across the street to see how everyone else is doing things, let alone across the ocean, so we stay in our miserable, hopeless little loop. Education reform is at the forefront of my generation’s mind, and yet when Obama, Hillary, and Bernie Sanders talk about providing free two-year education for everyone, no one I know thinks that it’ll ever actually happen. We see footage of police harassing, beating, and even murdering civilians in cold blood, yet the repercussions (if any) are almost always too light for the crimes. Our minimum wage is stagnant, and our middle-class continues to suffer, while any reasonable solutions to bridging the rich-poor gap is immediately decried as “socialism” (which, when it comes to social security and other programs, we already implement nationally). But I'll relent that Moore has a point; if countries that we have close, amicable relationships with have better policies in place, isn't there hope for us to learn from them and improve to our mutual benefit?
What Moore has done in what I consider his most emotional, powerful film to date (speaking as someone who teared up during the Walmart section of BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE) is show us what’s wrong with us not by yelling at us or our leaders, but by showing what’s right about the countries we dismiss as not being “the most powerful” or “the greatest country in the world”. He’s showing us what we could do, what hope the right government and social policies could provide to our suffering populous, in the attempt to inspire us to function on a better level as a whole. He never gets too deep in the pocket of the countries he goes to, he mostly stays focused on the subjects at hand (though some have complained about his extensive use of stock footage and TRIUMPH OF THE WILL), and (perhaps hardest to believe), he never ONCE mentions Flint, Michigan (though he jumped right into the Flint-speak in the post-film Q & A). Plus, he’s funnier and savvier than ever, and the cutaways and ironies that have always gotten laughs in his work make you chuckle, cry, and think all at the same time.
And the scene where he discusses how Finland has no private schooling, thus putting the rich kids alongside the poor kids and immediately making it harder for them to screw their schoolmates over in the future, straight up made me cry in the middle of the theater. We have a lot of work to do in this country, in almost all respects, and this is such a potent display of how we can improve that my chief criticism is that, because of Michael Moore’s brand (and the fascist nature of the MPAA, who’ve slapped this with an R rating due to footage containing nudity, marijuana usage, and Eric Garner’s death), not everyone will be inclined to seek this out and consider the film’s ideas for themselves. A shame. This is as crucial and powerful as FAHRENHEIT 9/11, and a better movie to boot. The film equivalent of Quato grabbing you by the head and saying, “OPEN YOUR MIND.”
