Yorgos Lanthimos Will Make Sure No One Wins an Oscar for Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos is sorry that his movies won all those awards. He hasn’t said as much, but that feels like the subtext buried not so far beneath the warmly shot, chilly-affect surface of Kinds of Kindness – perhaps easier to excavate than the movie’s actual thematic concerns. The triptych of dark, minimalist fables that comprise Kindness share actors, an unnerving Twilight Zone tone, and a series of rhymes and echoes that sometimes feel like a chorus repeatedly transposed into different keys. But they most immediately, obviously share a lack of interest in being liked.
That lack of fucks given was a source of character empowerment in the previous Lanthimos film, Poor Things, which won multiple Oscars and brought more overtly whimsical fairy-tale fantasy into the Lanthimos world and, with it, a wider audience. Emma Stone’s Bella Baxter, Frankenstein’s monster and daughter rolled into one, refuses to be hemmed in by social mores, and sets out in pursuit of pleasure, knowledge and, eventually, a rewarding sense of self, without concern that she was good or likable enough to deserve it. Yet the movie itself was, paradoxically (or maybe hypocritically for less impressed viewers), Lanthimos’s most accessible yet. Kinds of Kindness has no such inspirational or aspirational dimension, while also not feeling precisely like Killing of a Sacred Deer or The Lobster, the previous English-language films Lanthimos wrote with Efthimis Filippou, also the co-writer here. At times, it more resembles the kind of untoward poking, prodding, libidinous-yet-grotesque project Bella Baxter herself might wind up writing and directing.
Or maybe what Bella would put on TV if she somehow became a showrunner. Each segment of Kinds of Kindness rolls a cast list at its finish, typically lasting about the length of a current cable TV episode (which is to say, 45 minutes plus five to ten bonus minutes of prestige-TV stretch-out time). It’s easy to picture another filmmaker making a few more segments and coming up with one of those limited series streaming services love for their low-commitment, casual-watch auteurism. Yet stringing the segments together into a lengthy feature, complete with multiple credit rolls, does have a function: It somehow makes them feel all the more like a continual reset, a distant spiritual cousin to more overtly looped narratives like Run Lola Run.
So call it Sad Jesse Sad, because the movie keeps reincarnating recessive everyman Jesse Plemons. First, in “The Death of R.M.F,” he plays a man who strives to serve his boss (Willem Dafoe) to a maniacal degree of absurdity, surrendering control of every aspect of his life, until he finally reaches a line that he doesn’t feel comfortable crossing. In “R.M.F. Is Flying,” a new Plemons character becomes fanatically devoted to his own idea: the conviction that when his wife (Emma Stone) returns after being lost at sea, she is not actually who she claims to be. Finally, the cultish behavior of the first two segments becomes more explicit in “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich,” where Plemons takes a secondary role to Stone – both playing cult members looking for someone with the power to resurrect the dead.
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