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Yorgos Lanthimos Will Make Sure No One Wins an Oscar for Kinds of Kindness

Yorgos Lanthimos Will Make Sure No One Wins an Oscar for Kinds of Kindness
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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.

On their surfaces, these stories are more about pledges of fealty to belief systems than kindnesses, whether the beliefs in question are bought and paid for (as in the first), gut instincts that cannot be suppressed (as in the second), or some form of religion (as in the third). Are the movie’s acts of kindness the frequently grotesque, sometimes gruesome moments where characters allow others to devote themselves more fully to their cracked causes? While The Lobster and Killing of a Sacred Deer felt as if they were burrowing further and further into their singular and discomfiting fable-like premises, attempting to locate some essential truth underneath their dark laughs and alien-communication absurdity, the stories in Kinds of Kindness, by virtue of appearing in quick and cast-linked succession, feel more like poking, sometimes poky, conspicuously constructed experiments – even though, if anything, the characters speak with somewhat less hushed, formalized detachment.

It’s still there, to a degree, but is it that different from the usual Plemons performance style? That’s not a dig; Plemons mines a fascinating anti-charisma from his most memorable characters, molding their even-keeled minimalism to become comforting (Killers of the Flower Moon), terrifying (Civil War) or, occasionally, hilarious (Game Night). He’s ideal, then, for making the Lanthimos touch sound like a natural outgrowth of his constricted personality – of someone attempting to make something orderly out of madness. Dafoe does the same for malevolence, and Stone for her screwball exuberance, though in a different direction than her Poor Things turn.

It could be posited that Lanthimos does with talented supporting players like Margaret Qualley and Hong Chau what some critics accuse Wes Anderson of doing: flattening his talent into cut-out dolls for his dioramas. Kindness certainly doesn’t have the soulfulness of Anderson’s recent dabbles in anthology-style filmmaking, nor the freedom of Anderson’s more boldly presentational style; Lanthimos is too busy turning gore and especially sex into punchlines (sometimes quite good ones!), with a queasy or-am-I-maybe-actually-turned-on chaser. (Anderson, for all the charges of hermetic sealing, deploys both sex and violence with a matter-of-factness that rarely feels so cheap.)

Yet there’s value, too, in these exercises — these most remote of Lanthimos fables — and not just as a reassurance that he doesn’t intend to stick with feel-good Oscar winners for the duration. Images from Kinds of Kindness may prove to have similar staying power to those in his recent run of films, even with a more restrained use of fish-eyed cinematography: an empty swimming pool in bucolic sunlight, the speeding purple sports car Stone drives in the final segment, the nightgown Qualley wears like a uniform in the first, bodies contorted in any number of ways across all three or the movie’s memorable final shot, already spoiled by some of the trailers. Maybe this is his weird, Martian version of a cinema of sensations, where characters pursue their beliefs relentlessly, and the filmmaker indulges a kind of kindness by letting them, no matter how destructive. Or maybe it’s just a series of elaborate reminders that awards, in whatever form, aren’t everything.

Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Writer: Yorgos Lanthimos, Efthimis Filippou
Starring: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau
Release Date: June 21, 2024


Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including GQ, the A.V. Club, Decider, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.

 
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