New movie review: The Lobster

Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz go on the run in writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos' excellent The Lobster.

We should be past the point in human history where any of us believes there is one way for a person to live his life. We should be, but we are not. The loudest among us in fact want very much to dictate rules for how we act, speak, create, love, and in a larger sense exist. Some embrace these mandates as gospel, while others rebel, lash out, and decry the whole system. This push and pull is like an ideological tug of war in which no one wins but those shouting the commands. In truth, we should all probably just drop the damn rope.

In The Lobster, Greek writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos depicts a world drained of passion, expression, and choice. Its inhabitants are offered just one option, a single guiding path for their lives, and if they fail to remain on this path, a whole other oppressive structure awaits. The Lobster is a bold statement about the ways in which we let systems control us through fear, humiliation, and the threat of violence or worse. Because Lanthimos is a visionary filmmaker and singular storyteller, the film is also a darkly comic fable about a hotel where people are transformed into animals.

The rules of this world are established economically and matter-of-factly. To live in this society, you must have a romantic partner. If you do not have a partner – regardless of the reason, be it death, divorce, or lack of interest – you must register at the hotel, which operates like a cross between a singles cruise and a totalitarian re-education center. Those people who find their match are returned to The City to live out their days together. Those who do not meet someone in 45 days are transformed into the animal of their choosing.

Colin Farrell, here sapped of his usual roguish charm and dashing good looks, plays David, a schlumpy architect whose wife leaves him for another man. The first question he asks is whether the man is near-sighted, and we will soon find out why this question preoccupies him at this devastating moment. When he arrives at the hotel, accompanied by his brother, Bob, who has been transformed into a dog, he meets the Lisping Man (John C. Reilly), the Limping Man (Ben Wishaw), the Biscuit Woman (Ashley Jensen), and the Heartless Woman (Angeliki Papoulia).

Each of these people is identified by a single defining trait, both by the world at large and by their own consent. On their first night in the hotel, they must introduce themselves by their defining feature, and it becomes clear that in matchmaking, they will live or die (or rather, transmogrify) by whether they find another person with whom they share this trait.

We see people try to connect, some desperately, some earnestly, but most unsuccessfully. There is a sense of resignation in all of them. None wants to be turned into an animal, but they have been sapped of their ability to seek happiness in romance. In a world where the options are pair or perish, there is little time for passion, joy or love.

John C. Reilly, Ben Wishaw, and Farrell in The Lobster

Indeed, the Limping Man, believing himself unlikely to find a woman with a limp – there was one, but it turned out just to be a sprained ankle, he says dejectedly – decides to lie to the Nosebleed Woman (Jessica Barden) and claim he, too, is beset by bloody-nose fits. He resigns himself to bashing his face against walls and countertops several times daily for the rest of his life to achieve the illusion, thinking this better than the alternative.

In between these scenes of desperation, we get bracingly humorous insights into the ethos of this society. The hotel guests gather for demonstrations, hosted by the Hotel Manager (Olivia Colman), of how life is so much better for a couple. These include: A man eats alone and is seen to choke and die, but when seen eating with a partner, she is able to save his life. Also, a woman walks alone and is attacked by a rapist, but when she walks with a partner, the would-be rapist does nothing.

These lessons are presented dryly and accepted without question. We get a sense of a world without human emotion, and it begins to seem that in a place where becoming a wild animal is the worst fate that can befall you, even acting like a human being might be considered too beastly. After David’s own attempt at deception fails and he is forced to escape the hotel and live in the woods, Lanthimos shows us the beastly side of human nature.

He joins a group known as the Loners, who have rejected the rules of the system. They live as a pack in the woods and are hunted by guests of the hotel – each Loner caught represents an extra day in the hotel before being transformed. They live, for all intents and purposes, like the animals they would be turned into anyway. This is not the reprieve David might have hoped for, and he quickly realizes the Loners are as militant about not coupling as the rest of their society is about coupling.

Romantic liaisons among Loners are punished in creatively gruesome ways such as the Red Kiss (you do not want to know) and the Red Intercourse (do not ask). This poses a problem when David at long last meets the woman he believes could be his partner, the Nearsighted Woman (Rachel Weisz). Escapees from one totalitarian regime, their love is now forbidden by the only other system available to them.

All of this is executed gorgeously by Lanthimos and delivered wonderfully by the actors, whose purposefully wooden performances are more expressive than at first they appear. The stylistic choices – such as Lanthimos’ often-flat shot setups and the actors’ stilted line deliveries, among much else – are perfectly in keeping with the thematic investigations of the film.

As David and the Nearsighted Woman become emotionally more involved, their world opens up. They are capable of more together than they were apart, which is a seeming endorsement of the state’s rules, but it is not. Their love, their passion, and their commitment can only exist outside the systems the world would impose on them. They have dropped the rope on which they tugged and run from it. In this world though, there is another rope, tied tightly around the neck, and it is this noose from which they must escape to find happiness, love, and freedom.

See it? Yes.

New movie review: Youth

Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel star in writer-director Paolo Sorrentino's Youth.

Two years ago, filmmaker Paolo Sorrentino wrote and directed the Academy Award-winning The Great Beauty. Every element of that film, right down to its plot, owed a debt to Italian master Federico Fellini. In both style and substance, it was a direct riff on the classic La Dolce Vita. As such, it was a remarkably successful film, tapping into the bombast and irreverent energy of that earlier work. Though it may not exactly have been an original idea, Sorrentino at least showed he had a point of view and certainly demonstrated a directorial flair.

Now, Sorrentino is back with Youth, which borrows from the same playbook but lacks the passion or commitment of either The Great Beauty or the films that so influenced him. Youth is stuffed to the gills with ideas and imagery, but the whole ultimately adds up to much less than the sum of its parts. Every time the film gets close to pinning down some deeper truth or meaning, Sorrentino backs away, seemingly less out of fear than preoccupation. He perhaps has too many thoughts to get out and cannot focus on just one at a time.

Michael Caine plays Fred Ballinger, an internationally famous composer, now long retired, who is on holiday at an exclusive spa in the Alps. He is something of a miser, failing to find joy in much of anything, and his doctors, friends, and family have diagnosed him as apathetic. He seems to feel that diagnosis is accurate and does everything he can to embrace it. He is joined at the resort by daughter/assistant Lena (Rachel Weisz), legendary filmmaker Mick Boyle (Harvey Keitel), up-and-coming actor Jimmy Tree (Paul Dano), and a whole cavalcade of grotesques.

Generally speaking, it is folly to compare two filmmakers’ work directly, but in every decision he makes, Sorrentino invites the comparison to Fellini. In fact, he seems to relish it. The cast of characters – or caricatures, depending on your point of view – he assembles for Youth seems culled straight from a casting session for one of Fellini’s more whimsical flights of fancy. In addition to the central group, there is an obese former soccer star, an older married couple who never speaks, the recently named Miss Universe, a few pop stars playing themselves, and a teenage prostitute, among others.

These people mostly hang around the edges of the story, and most of them hardly say a word. They provide color to a relatively staid central plot, but that color is meant to give the illusion of depth. In practice, Sorrentino never seems interested in exploring any of their inner lives and instead settles for the mere suggestion they have inner lives before shifting the focus back to our central four.

The plot such as it is revolves around an emissary from Queen Elizabeth II who tries to persuade Fred to conduct again for a special ceremony. He refuses for personal reasons, and the rest of the film ostensibly explores what those personal reasons could be. Mick and a group of young writers are putting the finishing touches on a screenplay for the movie Mick wants to be his legacy, while Jimmy is resting before going off to shoot a Serious Film – the capital letters are mine. Lena is waiting to go on a trip with her husband, who is also Mick’s son, but he leaves her for one of those pop stars I mentioned. She is thus left adrift emotionally and geographically, so she remains at the spa.

Rachel Weisz in Youth.

For a movie featuring fantastic leading performances from Caine and Keitel, Weisz is actually the standout. Given a lot less to play by the script, Weisz takes a fairly cliché character – the adult daughter still hurt over the way her father treated the family – and gives the role a memorable spin, providing the kind of strength and motivation lacking in many of the other characters.

Caine is still a force to be reckoned with onscreen, and Sorrentino does well to play off his lead’s public persona as a debonair man about town who does not really care what others think of him. As Fred, Caine is charming and off-putting in equal measure, and from an audience standpoint, he is just a lot of fun to watch. Keitel is great as well but with a far more problematic character. Sorrentino wants us to be a lot more interested in Mick’s supposed crowning achievement than he gives us any reason to be.

At its core, the film is about artists concerned with their legacies while confronting more immediate matters such as aging and ill health. Sorrentino draws explicit parallels between the younger Jimmy, who is best known for playing a robot in a dumb science-fiction movie and wishes people knew his more serious films, and the older Fred, whose best known compositions are his “Simple Songs,” though he has written more complex and impressive works.

In theory, such contradictions and concerns could be fertile ground for exploration, introspection, and character development, but again, Sorrentino does not seem interested in exploring. It is more like a survey of all the ways these characters might feel about their lives and legacies. The film never seems to have a specific view on any of the ideas it presents but rather meanders from story to story, haphazardly tripping over stray profound thoughts along the way.

It must be acknowledged, however, that in all this wandering, Sorrentino manages to find some beautiful imagery and stunning compositions. It is almost remarkable for a movie that wants so badly to be about the importance of substance over style just how flashy the filmmaking is and how empty its ideas are. The alpine vistas are obviously gorgeous, but even the interiors are given energy and interest by Sorrentino’s camera placements and shot choices. If only the story had generated as much intrigue, Youth really could have been something.

See it? No.