Kinds Of A Drag

My thoughts on Kinds of Kindness

A funny thing happened to filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos on his way to becoming this generation’s cinematic  βρέφος τρομερό. His early Greek features, such as Dogtooth and Alps, were filled with bizarre ideas and often-grotesque comedic imagery but managed to catch favor with an international audience that stayed with him as he moved on to more elaborate productions featuring top Hollywood names and his last two films, The Favorite and Poor Things, both scored numerous awards between them, including the Best Actress prizes for their respective leads, Olivia Colman and Emma Stone. In other words, he has gone from being a daring surrealist determined to upend expectations of moviegoers to becoming to a viable commercial product. I suspect that this shift must have rattled Lanthimos a bit because with his latest film, Kinds of Kindness, he seems determined to recapture the loopy audacity of his early works—this time with a number of the familiar faces that he is now able to easily attract—but the resulting film, despite its occasional moments of undeniable, mostly proves to be a 164-minute-long reiteration of the old saw about how you can’t go home again.

This time around, Lanthimos and co-writer Efthimis Filippou (who co-wrote a number of Lanthimos’s earlier films) have presented us with a trio of individual stories (complete with overt section breaks and end credits for each one) that feature the same act but which, save for a couple of instances, are unrelated. The first, “The Death of R.M.F.,” centers on Robert (Jesse Plemons), a seemingly ordinary man who is under the thumb of his cheerfully domineering boss (Willem Dafoe), a man who dictates every aspect of Robert’s life, right down to the details of his sex life with his wife (Hong Chau), and rewards him with a luxurious life and gifts of sports memorabilia. Robert is pretty much okay with this but when he fails at one particular task and admits to his boss that he is unable to do what he has been asked for once, he is ruthlessly cut loose. Instead of relishing his freedom, Robert becomes determined to get himself back into his former employer’s good graces by any means necessary. Needless to say, things end badly—or do they?

In the second, “R.M.F. Is Flying,” Plemons returns as Daniel, a police officer who has been in a funk since his beloved wife, Liz (Emma Stone), was lost at sea while doing her work. Miraculously, Liz is found and returns home to the delight of everyone, except, oddly enough, for Daniel, who finds himself increasingly convinced that the Liz who has come home is not his wife but some kind of imposter. Naturally, the others think that Daniel must be having some kind of paranoid breakdown but nothing can dissuade him from this determination. Finally, he begins putting Liz through a series of increasingly humiliating and violent tasks as a way for her to prove to him that she really is his wife. Needless to say, things end badly—or do they?

In the final story, “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” Stone and Plemons play Emily and Andrew, two members of a cult led by a mysterious couple (Dafoe and Chau) who have been charged with finding a particular young woman whose alleged powers are considered to be of great importance to the group and their mission. After striking out with one potential candidate (Hunter Schaefer), they are approached by a woman (Margaret Qualley) who knows who they are and believes that her twin sister is the one for whom they are looking. Along the way, however, a reunion between Emily and the husband (Joe Alwyn) and child that she left for the cult goes very badly and results in her banishment from the cult, leaving her determined to figure out a way to get back in with them. Needless to say, things end badly—or do they?

From the recurring actors and themes to specific elements and actions (ranging from types of food to various forms of abuse), it is clear that Lanthimos is trying to make some comment on contemporary society and the ways that people try, and often fail, to form some kind of connections with the world around them and who are driven to despair and desperation when those connections are suddenly severed and they are forced to prove themselves to the ones that they ostensibly love. Of course, as anyone who has seen a Lanthimos film—particularly the ones made before he achieved true respectability with The Favorite and Poor Things—knows, these concerns are presented via situations teeming with sexuality and violence, often at the same time, and which deal with such grim topics as rape, suicide, murder and miscarriages, which are presented in a drier-than-dry deadpan tone that all but dares viewers to either laugh or be deeply offended as they are deployed.

It is pretty clear that Lanthimos wanted to return to the style and occasionally disturbing substance of those earlier films but as Kinds of Kindness goes on (and on), what used to come naturally to him back in the day now feels a little hollow and contrived. He knows how to accomplish these things on a surface level, I suppose, but he has gone past them as a filmmaker in recent years and his attempts to return to his style of those early projects never quite connects—the feeling is the same that you get watching Steven Spielberg struggling to recapture the heedless pleasures of his early blockbusters in such leaden later efforts as The Adventures of TinTin and Ready Player One. In essence, Lanthimos seems to be self-consciously attempting to present viewers with what they might expect from a film from him instead of pushing himself into new directions, as he did with the genuinely audacious Poor Things, and the effect becomes tiresome after a while.

Another problem with the film is that while the three stories are supposed to be similar-yet-different, the differences between them are not enough to make them interesting enough to seem them play out three times in a row, as if we are binge-watching a trio of episodes from an exceptionally bizarre anthology series. Part of the problem may be due to the fact that after a while, you can’t help but sit there and try to anticipate what kind of bizarre wringer that Lanthimos will put the characters through next instead of being surprised by what comes up. Another part may the fact that because the screenplay strips the narratives of most of the details about the characters and their lives in order to get to the good stuff, nothing seems to have any real weight to it in ways that might had to either the humor or the horror. As the film unspools, you get the sense that it is less Lanthimos offering viewers three different variations on a standard theme and more that he had an idea that he was unable to fully develop into a complete narrative after three attempts and took advantage of his new standing to make use of those discards.

And yet, even though Kinds of Kindness is clearly a misstep and an increasingly shallow and meaningless one at that, I will concede that it does contain a number of good things amidst all the stuff that doesn’t work. The cast, both Lanthimos veterans like Stone, Dafoe and Qualley (who gets a much better showcase for her increasingly valuable talents than she was offered in Poor Things) and newcomers, is uniformly good (with Schaefer doing so well in her one segment that you’ll wish that room could have been made for her in the other sections). There are also a number of individual moments and bits of business that indeed very funny (with one coming after the commencement of the final credits, so don’t flee as soon as they start). I also have a certain perverse admiration for Searchlight Films taking a film that seems destined to appeal to no one (Lanthimos fans will find it an increasingly repetitive variation on standard themes while those unfamiliar with him will likely find it all to be too weird for their tastes) and plopping it right in the middle of the summer box-office derby in what can be regarded as either an incredibly ambitious stab at counter-programming or a tacit admission that it would not have fared well during award season (though Plemons did win the Best Actor prize at Cannes).

In the end, Kinds of Kindness just didn’t click for me and while I suppose that ones mileage on this one will vary greatly from person to person, it just struck me as being just a little too self-satisfied for its own good without ever making a convincing case about whatever it was satisfied about in the first place. It is different, to be sure, but it is not different enough to shake yourself of the feeling that the goings-on are weird just for the sake of being weird. My hope is that Lanthimos uses this as a sort of deck-clearer for old ideas that he wanted to dispose of before moving into new cinematic waters. If that is the case, then perhaps this one will feel more important after all in the end, having provided an evidently much-needed service—or will it?