It’s normal to watch a movie and wonder who it’s “for.” Even productions with obvious chief demographics have appeal beyond those demographics, after all. Take the Marvel Cinematic Universe: Ostensibly its core audience comprises comic book aficionados, but over the last decade and change that audience has broadened to include the entire rest of the world. Those movies are “for” anyone. On the opposite end of that spectrum, however, lies Malcolm & Marie, directed, written and produced by Sam Levinson, who is perhaps the sole member of his own film’s audience. It’s less a story and more a fragile white male provocation, and it’s repulsive.
Hollywood has a long tradition of making movies about people in love who act more like they’re in hate. Go back to 1966’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or, if you’re not the time-traveling type, to 2019’s Marriage Story. These are merely a few chapters in a subgenre about volatile passions and toxic unions, and Levinson isn’t exactly doing anything new by treading that worn ground. His movie is abrasive in the same way like-minded films preceding it are abrasive. But Malcolm & Marie comes packaged with a primary purpose subsuming the baked-in themes of its niche—namely his volcanic, pathetic, and laughably entitled view of the entertainment critic industrial complex which, outside of his HBO series Euphoria, has not looked kindly on his work. Malcolm & Marie won’t change that.
The film functions like a big, black-and-white middle finger to film critics, for whom Malcolm (John David Washington) has no regard and whom Marie (Zendaya) doesn’t appear to have much empathy for either. Returning to their chic, modern home after the premiere of Malcolm’s new movie, the couple settle in for a long, hot night of cutting one another’s throats while listening to James Brown, NNAMDI and William Bell; drinking and smashing a couple bowls of macaroni and cheese—the latter to a soundtrack of saliva and teeth, chewing around grunts of satisfied mastication.
Their back-and-forth (and the whole damn movie is back-and-forth) is unearned emotional whiplash as they go from making kissy faces, to scowling, to laughing together, to laughing at each other, to screaming. This isn’t a relationship. It’s a civil war. For most viewers, the key question will be whether the inferno of Malcolm and Marie’s unhinged romance lands, and whether watching two people hurt each other in ways only lovers can is worth enduring for 100 or so minutes. The immaturity of Malcolm’s fiery tirades, launched with indignant gusto, are the film’s animating purpose; the bickering and squabbling and cursing its surface. But the knives Levinson sharpens for his critics are the impetus behind it all, and they simply won’t leave a mark on his audience.