is the amount of time that
traditionally elapses before
satire grows brittle and sinks
into clever-dickery. In terms
of inaction on climate change
— the film’s subtext — social
media is a soft target. If
anything, the younger
generation are more clued
into environmental
collapse than their
analogue parents,Jennifer Lawrence is the
closest thing we have to Elvis:
the slob genius, the slovenly
prodigy, the girl who wanders
on to the stage, says, “Is this
thing on?” and belts out
another winner. She acts the
way other people snack on
tubes of Pringles: like it’s no
biggie, and that naturalness
has made her a star. Having
won an Oscar for Silver
Linings Playbook at the tender
age of 22, the only thing
unnatural about her is the
attention that has come her
way, so it makes perfect
sense, after three years’
absence from screens —
enjoying a traditional
post-Oscar break, or having
what used to be called “a life”
— she’s back as someone who
is ignored by the world and
can’t get on social media to
save her life. Yeah, right.
In Adam McKay’sambitious, uneven satire
Don’t Look Up, Lawrence
plays Kate Dibiasky, a grad
student with a nose ring who
wears a set of fearsomely
hairy sweaters, working with
nerdy astronomer Dr Mindy
(Leonardo DiCaprio), who
discovers a comet on a
collision course with Earth.
“I gotta get high,” Kate says,
not unreasonably. They take
the news to the White
House, where Madam
President (Meryl
Streep) is more
obsessed with the
mid-terms — “we
should get our own
people on this” — so
they go to the media,
and a morning show
called The Rip hosted by Tyler
Perry and Cate Blanchett,
where they fail to make a dent
in the Twittersphere. Such
is the satirical premise of
McKay’s film — the world is
going to end and we’re all
glued to our smartphones.
It’s a great idea — a DrStrangelove with emojis — or it
is for about 45 minutes, which
so it isn’t the case that the
message isn’t getting through.
One imagines McKay had no
trouble recruiting the
celebrities for the cameos that
stud this film like diamantés
on a brooch — Ariana Grande
and Kid Cudi as a singer and a
DJ; Timothée Chalamet as a
skateboard punk; and, best^
of all, Jonah Hill as the
president’s chief of staff and
cokehead son, who stokes the
fires of denial as the public
divide into alarmists and
denialists — “Don’t look up!”
— who are persuaded that the
comet will bring jobs.
As Barry Levinson realised
when he made Wag the Dog,
the lifespan for gadfly satires
is short. At 138 minutes,^
Don’t Look Up grows mightily
repetitive, which doesn’t
leave the performances
anywhere to go, except
louder. If there’s anything
less enjoyable than DiCaprio
turning up the volume in
search of a performance —he
did the same thing in The Wolf
of Wall Street and Once Upon
a Time in... Hollywood too —
I don’t know what it is. LikeTom Cruise, he has all the
virtues of a great movie star
save that of relaxation.
“I’m an unnatural mother,”
blurts out Leda (Olivia
Colman) in Maggie
Gyllenhaal’s sinuous
adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s
The Lost Daughter, and
the statement seems both a
confession and a throw-down:
so sue me. A divorced
middle-aged academic in
Boston, she arrives for a
holiday on a Greek island
on her own. Mild-mannered
and polite on the surface
but prickly and hostile
underneath: when a party of
boorish Italian-Americans ask
her to move her sun umbrella
and deckchair to make space
for them on the beach, she
refuses, provoking a flurry of
obscenities. And when the
young daughter of the group’s
young mother Nina (Dakota
Johnson) is lost, Leda finds
her, but steals the little girl’s
doll, for as yet opaque reasons.
She is a mass of contradictions,
brimful of tears at the sight of
a mother and daughter one
minute, the next confiding:Back with a bang
Jennifer Lawrence is the best thing about a celeb-studded
doomsday satire with Leonardo DiCaprio and Meryl Streep
“Children are a
crushing
responsibility.”
Clytemnestra felt
much the same way.
At first you think
the film shapes up
as one of those subtly
disquieting psychological
thrillers that Ian McEwan
used to excel at. Has Leda lost
a child herself? When she
talks about her grown-up
daughters is she lying?
Working with the French
cinematographer Hélène
Louvart, Gyllenhaal shoots
mainly in close-up, handing
the film to Colman, who is
fantastic in these early scenes,
conveying a particularly
British mixture of sweetness
and misanthropy, her origins
revealed in flashback.
We see Leda, now played
by Jessie Buckley, an
ambitious young academic
trying to balance her work
and motherhood — snapping
at her daughters, hitting one
of them and slamming doors
to get away. “I’m suffocating,”
she cries to her husband
(Oliver Jackson-Cohen).
Anyone who has ever heard^
a baby cry unattended in
a supermarket will find
Gyllenhaal’s film an
uncomfortable watch, in its
presentation and validation
of “bad” motherhood as
transgressive liberation from
society’s mores. She’s daring
to throw off the yoke of
maternal devotion.
It’s not entirely successful
because the source material^
is a little shallower than
Gyllenhaal seems to think.
At first you long to know what
tragedy has befallen Leda to
leave her so stricken but,
as flashbacks reveal an
adulterous affair with a
flirtatious academic (Peter
Sarsgaard), the heart of the
story is revealed as one of
those self-justifying accounts
of academic adultery that
Philip Roth used to be berated
for. Does the fact that a
woman is the one abandoning
her family make the
behaviour any less selfish, or
the selfishness any more
profound? It is certainly more
taboo, which accounts for
some of the film’s queasy
allure, but in Leda’s kinship
with Nina, and the cutaways
to clamorous children, one
senses Ferrante elevating her
own misanthropy into a
universal truth: unnatural
mothers of the world unite! cFILM/STREAMING
Don’t Look Up
is available to
stream on Netflix,
from Christmas
EveThe Lost
Daughter is
available to
stream on Netflix,
from New Year’s
EveComet crash Jennifer
Lawrence. Below: Olivia
ColmanDon’t Look Up
Adam McKay, 15, 138min
HH
The Lost Daughter
Maggie Gyllenhaal, 15, 121min
HHHH
TOM
SHONE
16 19 December 2021