Post by Dracula on Jul 7, 2024 11:31:17 GMT -5
Kinds of Kindness(6/29/2024)
The film’s use of actors in multiple roles is largely quite successful; the cast does a good job of differencing the various characters they play and it is interesting how well each of these parts seems to fit the various actors chosen. Plemons and Stone obviously work hard here but their main supporting cast of Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Margaret Qualley also all rise to the occasion and the film adeptly avoids making this whole format feel like some kind of gimmick. Lanthimos is actually a bit more restrained than usual behind the camera: he’s mostly put away the fisheye lens for this one and is generally less aggressive in his choice of angles and since the film is mostly set in the here and now there’s less in the way of strange costumes and the like which we saw in his last couple of movies. That fits this project through as the cynicism and darkness are probably aggressive enough that the film doesn’t need a strange visual style piling on top of things. The movie still qualifies as a (very) dark comedy but it’s not going for laughs in the same way as something like Poor Things did, in general it’s just a less audience pleasing piece of work, but it’s a strong auteur piece just the same. It’s probably the most successful anthology film we’ve gotten since the Coen Brothers gave us The Ballad of Buster Scruggs and is a must see for Lanthimos fans for myself, maybe not so much for people who already found Lanthimos previous work to be a bit much.
****1/2 out of Five
The last two Yorgos Lanthimos movies, The Favourite and Poor Things, made $95 million and $117 million worldwide respectively and were nominated for 9 and 11 Oscars respectively. As someone who’s been following this guy’s work going back to Dogtooth I find that absolutely insane. The man makes movies that are so aggressively weird that I never would have thought they’d gain a big audience but audiences have proven more open minded than I might have expected and Lanthimos has proven more adept at meeting them halfway than I would have expected. This is not to say that he “sold out” at all to find this new audiences, those movies were both still extremely “weird” but he did make some adjustments which fit those two movies but also made them a bit less alienating. Most notably, both of those movies were written by a guy named Tony McNamara (and Deborah Davis in the case of The Favourite) rather than Lanthimos himself and his usual writing partner Efthimis Filippou, and this definitely gave those movies a different narrative thrust than something like The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer and also gave both movies a more hopeful outlook by their ends than what you’re normally going to get from Lanthimos. Well, having done his more accessible work and having reaped clear rewards for that, Lanthimos is now back with his “one for him,” an anthology film called Kinds of Kindness written by himself and Filippou which looks to pick up where The Killing of a Sacred Deer left off and bring the scabrous bite back to his cinema, though this time on a bigger budget and with a more stacked cast.
Kinds of Kindness is structured as a “triptych” three short films, each averaging about fifty minutes each and all of them staring the same cast in different roles. There’s seemingly one character shared between them is a guy named “RMF” played by an old friend of Lanthimos’ named Yorgos Stefanakos who only briefly appears in each, doesn’t talk, doesn’t have his initials explained, and it’s not clear if it’s supposed to be the same guy between them. Outside of that each segment is stand-alone in its storytelling and their all connected by theme and sensibility rather than subject matter or genre. The first story is called "The Death of R.M.F" and centers on a guy named Robert Fletcher (Jesse Plemons) who appears to be in the enthrall of his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe) to the point that Raymond is dictating his every action and life decision and has been for years. This arrangement has been lucrative for Robert but he’s balking at Robert’s latest order and this could lead to some serious fallout. The second story "R.M.F. is Flying," now follows a police officer named Daniel (also played by Plemons), whose wife Liz (Emma Stone) has just been found having survived on a desert island for months after a shipping accident and is returning home. Daniel should be happy but Liz starts displaying some odd behavior and he begins to wonder if this is really the same person he’s been missing. Finally we get "R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich" which focuses on a woman named Emily (Emma Stone, again) who is a member of a cult run by a guy named Omi (Willem Dafoe, again) and who has seemingly been on a mission to find this cult’s messiah, a person with a dead twin who will have what basically amounts to faith healing powers.
In terms of basic tone and feel Kinds of Kindness feels like a pretty clear return to what Lanthimos was doing with something like The Killing of a Sacred Deer. In fact a shortened version of that movie probably would have fit in pretty well with the segments here. Like that movie the characters here are often unnaturally blunt in the way they speak to each other and take somewhat extreme actions at times and they often find themselves in these really tough no-win situations that almost seem to be imposed on them by the universe. In terms of theme though the movie harkens back to what is the central concept through much of Lanthimos’ cinema: power and the way people use it to control others. The first film is about control exerted by an employer, the second about control exerted within a marriage, and the third about control exerted by a cult or religion or faith more broadly. The first segment with the domineering boss in particular feels like something of a companion piece to Dogtooth in that they’re both about people in a position of power seeming to control someone’s life in extreme and arbitrary ways just for the sake of doing so. These themes of power and control are also present in The Favourite and Poor Things as well but those movies are more interested in giving their characters some way to overcome the people trying to control them, these more raw Lanthimos movies are less hopeful and tend to end with people either making hard choices or just kind of getting curb stomped by fate.
****1/2 out of Five
