It’s hard to imagine that the same man who burst onto the scene with “Dogtooth” — a ferociously puzzling satire on parenting — would come to be acquainted with Hollywood’s bug-eyed sweetheart Emma Stone (“La La Land”). Even when director Yorgos Lanthimos (“Poor Things”) started making English-speaking films (and establishing his name), he didn’t lose his filmic accent: He was still that weird indie Greek guy. Stone, on the other side of the industry, was slinging across Manhattan skylines and raising a glass to the fools who dream. Yet, despite their wildly different backgrounds, the two somehow came together.
“The Favourite” was their first unexpected project together, and it marked a turning point in their respective careers. Stone took on a notably more dramatic role, and the film was somewhat of a conventional pivot for Lanthimos, who had shed the brutalist deadpan of his prior films. Since then, though, their films have gotten stranger — or, should I say, Lanthimos has become more himself. The popular “Poor Things” followed, which was a healthy mix of peculiar and approachable. With his most recent effort, Lanthimos has gone full circle: He’s brought all his geeky Hollywood buddies into his creative world. And, oh boy, is it fucked up. “Kinds of Kindness” is totally Lanthimos’ baby, and its babbling is incomprehensibly strange.
The film’s oddity is not all that surprising. “Kinds of Kindness” is co-written by Lanthimos’ long-time collaborator Efthymis Filippou (“Dogtooth”), who’s responsible for everything but “The Favourite” and “Poor Things” — two of Lanthimos’ more approachable pivots. It seems that when these two hunker down and write a story, the concepts of normality and taboo fly out of the window. “Kinds of Kindness” is an anthology film composed of three roughly 50-minute stories, all starring Stone, Jesse Plemons (“Civil War”), Willem Dafoe (“Spider-Man”) and Margaret Qualley (“Drive-Away Dolls”). The stories seem to be linked by a mysterious recurring character, R.M.F., and the screenwriters’ dogmatic aversion to anything resembling human behavior as hapless self-devotion, self-mutilation and self-harm take center stage.
The first story follows Plemons as an architect, subservient to his boss played by Dafoe, who has very, very specific instructions about what Plemons is to do. Each day, Plemons receives a hand-written card that states what times he must wake up, eat, shower and make love. On one particular day, the card demands too much of Plemons, and the story focuses on the ensuing conflict between the boss and his feeble employee. With such a bizarre premise, it’s all the more riveting that Lanthimos doesn’t ground the film formally. He and cinematographer Robbie Ryan (“Marriage Story”) play around with awkward angles, consistently breaking the 180 rule and generally going buck-wild in the editing room. The heavy piano score, parading on each scene, only adds to the perversity. It’s an off-kilter thrill that elicits a great deal of awkward laughter, a compelling first leg to what, one hopes, will be a film that makes more sense in the next two hours.
Instead, “Kinds of Kindness” just gets stranger over its hefty runtime. Too strange. To the point where no one’s behavior makes a lick of sense — emotionally or logically. The second story follows Plemons as a cop whose wife, played by Stone, returns home from an accident acting a bit unusual; the situation prompts him to figure out what’s wrong with her — in a very disturbing way. The third story is a purity-related cult tale where Stone is ousted by Dafoe for being “contaminated.” The kicker? These two stories fail to be intelligible on their own or illuminate anything about the grander narrative — if there is one to begin with. With such indecipherable plots and actions, Lanthimos and Fillipou prompt us to read the film thematically, but if there’s a coherent message, then it must have been spoken in tongues. The provocative stories are all broadly about control, and though my knee-jerk instinct is to reject such a simple read — especially for Lanthimos — “Kinds of Kindness” doesn’t give much in the way of an interpretative olive branch.
Previous projects by Lanthimos and Fillipou downright match or exceed the alienness of this effort — namely “Dogtooth” and “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.” But the inexplicable actions in those films are couched by a demented world, adhering to a morbid logic. “Kinds of Kindness” feels like randomness for randomness’s sake, and that can only remain riveting for so long. In retrospect, the film’s first story is only compelling because it was new, not because it’s a step in quality above the following two. All three parts are about as equally baffling and indecipherable. The “for-the-hell-of-it” approach bears out in the performances as well. Stone — who has delivered her best, most abstract work with Lanthimos — is very much “acting” here, seemingly given the direction to be freaky and nothing else. So, too, do the great Dafoe, Plemons and Qualley put on a show: Their odd mannerisms are too intentioned to fit the whimsical perversity of each story.
The acting is emblematic of the entire film. “Kinds of Kindness” feels like a performance, an elaborate one to prove that Lanthimos is still that weird indie Greek guy (with Hollywood friends). He’s trying too hard — with all the jarring needle drops, the mystifying black-and-white sequences and, of course, the story. Lanthimos is still a creative force, so it would be disingenuous to say that the film isn’t interesting — even at his worst, Lanthimos is a dazzling provocateur. But it would also be disingenuous to say that “Kinds of Kindness” is enjoyable — it’s just kind of exhausting.
Daily Arts Writer Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
The post ‘Kinds of Kindness’: A whole lot of “Huh.” appeared first on The Michigan Daily.
Leave a Reply