Leave The World Behind / May December

In which Netflix swings for the critical fences; to no good end.

From the wiki, here and here. Fair use.

Leave The World Behind (2023). Grade: D+. May December (2023). Grade: D

I just assumed, watching Leave The World Behind, that it was by a European director. Because it rips off bits from American popular culture so blatantly; that’s usually something a French director would do, and consider it “homage.” There’s a huge ship crashing ashore, just like in The Lost World. There’s a plague of creatures plopping from the sky, just like in Magnolia. Fleets of abandoned cars, like The Day After (and also War Of The Worlds, the bad Tom Cruise one). And, Gods help us, the TV show Friends is held up as an example of how people should treat each other more nicer-er.

But no, the director’s an American, Sam Esmail. His parents are of Egyptian heritage; he was born in Hoboken. In 1977. And apparently hasn’t ever watched a movie made earlier than in 1977. That’s not strictly true; he says he’s a big Kubrick fan. (No doubt he loves Barry Lyndon.) But everything here feels tediously familiar.

It’s the apocalypse — sort of. Some sort of massive technology crash that’s upending civilization as we know it. And it hints that the crash is caused by what rotten jerks most of us are. So, like The Twilight Zone, but dumb.

To Esmail’s credit, he has a good cast here, and he uses them well enough. You’ve got Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali, both actors who radiate intelligence. (Whether or not they are smart people in real life, I do not know.) They’re playing sharp, wary characters; it suits their skills. You’ve also got Ethan Hawke, for once not playing a wounded genius soul; his character’s meant to be shallow. (Whether or not Ethan Hawke is a shallow person in real life, I do not know; when he plays a wounded genius soul, I can never buy it for a second.)

Myha'la plays a teen, the one who idolizes Friends. Is that what teens like? Now? No wonder they can’t read books. Kevin Bacon shows up as a psychotic doomsday prepper; he’s fine at it, but that part was funnier when Michael Gross did it in Tremors.

Leave The World Behind is well-made enough to barely hold your interest; that’s the most that can be said for it. There was one writer in the 1980s or 1990s, I forget their name, who had a good phrase for the over-produced, meaning-heavy, empty-headed music videos of the period: how they specialized in “instant cliches.” Images that hit you, but are empty at the core. Almost everything in Leave The World Behind that isn’t a direct ripoff is an instant cliche. Like “November Rain,” without Slash crashing into a wedding cake. The cake-crashing is better.

The movie’s based on a novel by Rumaan Alam; Wiki says it “recieved mostly favorable reviews.” Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri said “every change made for the adaptation happens to be for the worse.”

May December is worse than cliched and shallow; it’s mean and lazy. The director, Todd Haynes, made a movie about Karen Carpenter using Barbie dolls. I haven’t seen it. The very concept screams “I am doing something exploitative, but I am doing it with a sarcastic use of pop culture, so I am Cool/Snarky.” Maybe I’m wrong about that film; I don’t want to see it.

Haynes also made the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, which was critically lauded for depicting Dylan’s many personas using different actors. It bored me stupid, and I’m a big Dylan fan. Cate Blanchett did one of her Masterful Mimic In Mucky Movie turns — she really nails the Don’t Look Back era. But Weird Al did it much funnier:

(That’s Dr. Demento as Ginsberg, by the way. I had to look it up, because I thought it might have been David Cross!).

Blanchett was also in Carol, Haynes’s adaptation of a Patricia Highsmith novel. Her performance almost carries the movie; when she looks like her heart is breaking, it gets to you. But I’m sorry, I do not see how anyone’s heart could break for Rooney Mara. (Maybe in real life she’s a wonderful person. I do not know.)

Here, the wasted talents on display are Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman. The movie’s loosely inspired by the real-life story of Mary Kay Letourneau, a teacher in Washington who pled guilty to statutory rape of a 12-year-old student; she later married him. He later struggled with suicidal depression.

That’s like making a film about Karen Carpenter! A famous sad story you can hang some ironies on and call it deep! Who cares about the real people who were hurt?

But see, here the Natalie Portman character is playing a pretty amoral actor, who worms her way into the older woman & younger man’s lives, purportedly for “research.” Which is shown, at the end, to be “research” for a fairly crappy low-budget exploitation movie.

So — this isn't exploitation, right? If it’s a movie about how low-budget filmmakers use exploitative material, then it’s SATIRE. Of society, or filmmakers who have smaller budgets, or something. It made me angry at Haynes to watch this. (At least his other films I’ve seen are tiresome and pretentious; they didn’t make me mad.)

And the direction here is lazy. The movie’s supposedly set in the South. But everyone talks like they’re from Connecticut; even the townies. (The original script was set in Maine, prior to revision.) Is that just because everyone Todd Haynes knows talks that way? (They must all live in houses this size, too.) The lazy direction here isn’t latter-day Hitchcock, Topaz-level of lazy; you have to be an ailing egomaniac stuffed full of French critical overpraise for that. Yet this sure isn’t any fun to watch.

In one of life’s weird little twists, a big Haynes admirer is director Kelly Reichardt. (Who I think is brilliant, but I won’t suggest jumping into her unusual, difficult movies until another day, when I will.) Yet Reichardt would never turd on all her characters the way Haynes does here. Usually, when she shows you a character behaving badly, there’s enormous empathy behind it. The Jesse Eisenberg character in Night Moves is pretty cold and unfeeling — but Reichardt shows how this isolates him, how it hurts his life. The May December characters all hurt each others’ lives and you’re meant to feel superior to them. That’s a rotten thing to do to your characters, and to your audience.

(Maybe Reichardt likes Haynes because he a nice person; maybe he is. I wouldn't know.)

So, don’t watch these movies! Unless you have to, for some reason! And if you have to, watch the one with Julia Roberts and Mahershali Ali! At least when they get irritated in the movie, it’s kinda amusing, a little!