Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos perpetuates the male gaze in his self-indulgent, overlong paeon to the world of the weird for the sake of it.
Funny how? Emma Stone and Margaret Qualley (in wheelchair)
Photo credit: Atsushi Nishijima, Image courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
There’s very little kindness of any kind in Yorgos Lanthimos’s most misogynistic film to date. Plunging his viewfinder into the depths of the Theatre of Cruelty, he has come up with a work of staggering self-indulgence. It is a malady that has infected many a lauded director given the means to hang themselves, from Terrence Malick and Michael Cimino to, fleetingly, Darren Aronofsky. What is more startling is the loyalty afforded him by stars of the calibre of Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons. Willem Dafoe, however, has never been shy of a bit of experimental extremism and fits in just peachily.
A three-part anthology, Kinds of Kindness promises the riches of Damián Szifron's decidedly wild and wonderful Wild Tales (2014). But the latter was just two hours long and Kinds of Kindness chugs along at 164 minutes, although it feels a good deal longer. It doesn’t help that the same actors appear in all three segments, albeit in various guises. Different performers would have added a refreshing and much-needed degree of variety. As it is, Emma Stone and Margaret Qualley gamely divest themselves of their clothing in scenes sordidly promoting the male gaze. Their trust in their director’s aesthetic is endearing.
Returning to the postmodern stance of the Greek Weird Wave, Lanthimos – fresh off the acclaim he has received for The Favourite and Poor Things – indulges his passion for the surreal, stilted delivery and self-conscious staging of his earlier films, but at a greater length and on a bigger budget. And in between the mannered longueurs, he is sage enough to throw in the occasional moment of shock value to keep his audience awake for another twenty minutes or so.
Filmed in and around New Orleans, under largely overcast skies, Lanthimos’s triptych kicks off its narrative with the tale of Robert Fletcher, a man (Plemons) whose every move is dictated by a creepy businessman (Dafoe). He is instructed who to marry, what to eat and what to read (Anna Karenina), but draws the line at ramming his car into the vehicle of another man, the reoccurring ‘R.M.F.’ (a random male figure). For his unflagging obedience, Fletcher is rewarded with a comfortable home and bizarre gifts (such as a tennis racquet mangled by John McEnroe in a fit of pique), but when he oversteps the mark by refusing to kill the stranger, his luck takes a turn for the worse – and it just gets weirder.
Occasionally, there are moments of cinematic ingenuity, startling close-ups of food and passionate tongues, but they feel decidedly diluted in the drawn-out languor of the film’s telling, set to a discordant score on piano and monastic chanting. Here, the black comedy is more black than amusing, although over almost three hours there are three or four moments when the director twists a smile out of his material.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Emma Stone, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamoudou Athie, Hunter Schafer, Merah Benoit, Yorgos Stefanakos, Suzanna Stone, Jerskin Fendrix.
Dir Yorgos Lanthimos, Pro Ed Guiney, Andrew Lowe, Yorgos Lanthimos and Kasia Malipan, Screenplay Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou, Ph Robbie Ryan, Pro Des Anthony Gasparro, Ed Yorgos Mavropsaridis, Music Jerskin Fendrix, Costumes Jennifer Johnson, Sound Johnnie Burn, Dialect coach Mary McDonald-Lewis.
Element Pictures/Film4/TSG Entertainment-Searchlight Pictures/Disney.
164 mins. USA/UK/Ireland. 2024. UK and US Rel: 28 June 2024. Cert. 18.
