Starring: Adam Driver, Greta Gerwig and Don Cheadle
Distributor: Netflix
Runtime: 135 mins. Reviewed in Dec 2022
Reviewer: Peter W Sheehan
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This satirical film dramatises an American family’s attempts to come to grips with the conflicts of life in the US. It aims to satirise American culture in an in-depth, original way.
This US-British black comedy is adapted from a novel of the same name, written by Don DeLillo in 1985. The film is written by movie director, Noah Baumbach. It is Baumbach’s first time for writing and directing a film. Fictionally, the film is narrated by a US professor of Hitler Studies (Driver). Filming took place in the state of Ohio, US, and the movie opened the Venice International Film Festival in 2022.
In the film, Jack Gladney (Driver) is a liberal arts professor of Hitler studies and a popular Head of Hitler Studies and Advanced Nazism at a small American College in Ohio, US. He is father to four children from different marriages, and is realising he might be losing his fourth wife Babette (Gerwig), the woman he loves. Babette is fighting drug-addiction that is affecting her memory. She and Jack are both preoccupied with death.
Jack’s life is torn asunder by a traumatic event – a train carrying toxic chemical waste crashes and spreads waste through the town, resulting in the town being evacuated. Meanwhile, there is a rivalry between Jack and Murray Siskind (Cheadle), an academic who is an expert on Elvis Presley and wants to do for Elvis Presley, what Jack has done for Adolf Hitler.
Special conflict occurs when Jack learns that the town’s evacuation has been engineered to help people “practice” effective evacuation procedures, for when catastrophes occur in the future. Information from local agencies about what has happed is totally misguided, and the film effectively highlights “fake news”. Driver gives a highly charismatic, absorbing portrayal of an academic, who, when faced with uncertainty, displays maladaptive responses to stress.
The film’s targets are wide, major, and thought-provoking. The film embraces consumerism, death, unreliable information about life-threatening events, the fragility of human relationships, the stability of marriage, over-indulgent teaching in academia, the spread of paranoia, excessively popular academic studies, media misinformation, and human talent for facilitating environmental catastrophes.
This is a film that is basically about a poorly functioning society in post-pandemic time, and what could occur if things go terribly wrong. The film is particularly critical of excessive consumerism, and political non-action, but zeroes consistently in on “catastrophes”, and “fear of death”.
The movie as a whole is a complex mix of satire, social critique, and social-political commentary about feared events that may, or may not, happen. Provocatively, it offers criticism of religious beliefs, viewed as beliefs intentionally supplied for comfort and convenience.
The film struggles with putting all its provocative ideas onto the cinema screen, and it often loses itself in what it wants to say, but it is a highly inventive film that employs impressive visual displays. The train crash and the final visual display are remarkable.
This is a highly original movie that critically deconstructs American culture. It examines the meaning of life in modern America, and intentionally explores a range of issues that are selected to arouse anxiety. It is an eccentric, unsettling film based on the apocalyptic thoughts of a free-thinking academic. Ambitious in scope, wide-ranging, and at times exhilarating, the film plunges viewers deep into events that evoke significant social, political, and personal concerns.
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