Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Stars: Jesse Plemons, Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe
Snatched opportunistically from a handful of schedules during the post-production of Oscar hit Poor Things, Yorgos Lanthimos reconfigures his fluctuating stable of impeccable actors for a typically dark and quixotic triptych, authored with his former long-time collaborator Efthymis Fillippou. Here they present three tales of devotion, each scrutinising at least one character for the lengths they will go to in the service of another. For those initiate only in Lanthimos’ recent, good humoured flights of fancy with Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things) this return to darkly comic, edgelordish territory might well prove too baffling and bleak. The rest of us will be in hog’s heaven, however.
Appearing so soon after his biggest crossover hit to date, Kinds of Kindness has a way of feeling like the Amnesiac to Poor Things‘ Kid A. It’s more fragmented, knottier, jazzier, bathed in hues of the past. It feels like a lost anthology film of the ’70s (though its very much a contemporary piece), and it is unapologetically its authors’ creation. There’s no bending to commercial impulses here. It makes the Searchlight Pictures ident at the top seem all-the-more hysterical. The idea that this will inevitably end up dumped onto Disney+ where any old family might find it.
The small cast take on new roles which each story, giving Kinds of Kindness a marked theatrical quality and pointedly separating it from any overarching singular ‘world’ in which one might be inclined to imagine it’s disparate stories taking place. Curiously, however, all feature one minor (yet often pivotal character) who is played consistently throughout. The enigmatic ‘R.M.F’ (Yorgos Stefanakos) whose importance is prompted due to each story featuring him in it’s title.
In the first – and most straightforward – story, “The Death of R.M.F.” we meet Robert (Jesse Plemons), a man so devoted to his boss Raymond (Willem Dafoe) that he has allowed every aspect of his life to be dictated by the man. Yet when Raymond asks Robert to complete a task that stands in opposition to his morals, Robert makes a choice that unwittingly unravels his entire life as Raymond starts taking away all the ties and creature comforts to which Robert has grown so accustomed.
None of these stories offer us heroes, and it transpires that Robert has done some particularly wicked things in service of his blind love for his employer. Plemons is terrific here, charting an increasingly desperate breakdown while sporting a ‘tache that has him looking remarkably like the great Tom Atkins. Dafoe is also at his most deliciously rancid, and the fable sets out the stall for the darker, thornier stories ahead. Getting us comfortable in the shallows, Lanthimos guides us into deeper territory.
“R.M.F. Is Flying” also places Plemons at it’s centre, this time as police officer Daniel, an unassuming quarter of a quartet of swingers whose marine biologist wife Liz (Emma Stone) is missing at sea. When she is miraculously returned, however, Daniel disappears into a paranoiac spiral, convinced that she is an imposter with different sized feet. Here devotion is tested with immense cruelness by Daniel, and we are pushed to question whether the callous trials he puts Liz through could ever be warranted. Naturally, there’s a sting in the tale, one almost as morbidly funny as at the terminus of the movie’s final chapter.
“R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich” finds Plemons and Stone partnered up again, this time as traveling cult members Emily and Andrew, out scourging the local landscape for a messianic figure that they have scant information about. They know they’re looking for a surviving twin. They know her weight and certain information about the measurements from her nipples to her belly. But a heinous act of sexual violence against Emily leaves her outcast and desperate to re-establish herself.
Each new wild situation takes time stabilising the viewer before the outrageous machinations of plot or extreme actions of the characters destabilise us once more. Lanthimos and Fillippou seem to enjoy this process of steadying and unmooring greatly. It for sure exists in all of their previous work together from Dogtooth through The Killing of a Sacred Deer, but rarely have the ricochets been as frequent as presented here. That’s a result of compacting three stories into one 164 minute ride through the wastelands of morality.
While sexual violence is rarely depicted explicitly, it exists in all of these stories in some form even if it doesn’t always manifest as a traditional ‘rape’. While one might take this recurrence as a sign of some dark predilection, it’s really in-keeping with Lanthimos’ overarchingly wicked study of human behaviour. Kinds of Kindness is rather a droll name for this carnival of cruelty, in which the human animal is consistently revealed as self-serving in spite of its through-line of subservience to others.
Indeed, Kind of Kindness revels in desperation, makes great comedy out of it, prods us to consider that the devout will perform heinous self-serving acts and proclaim them selfless as in service to some greater Godhead. Poisoning, animal cruelty, vehicular manslaughter, even abrupt suicide. Is any act every truly altruistic?
If this all sounds disgustingly bleak, it sorta kinda is, but there are such joys along the way for the sickos ready to embrace them. From the visually comic – like Emily’s persistently cavalier handling of her purple Dodge Challenger – to overarching aesthetic pleasures. After all the baroque trappings of Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness has a relatively earthen, grainier textural palette and visual language (the sun-dappled coastal US is a refreshing look for Lanthimos), while the sets and costuming further this sense of a ’70s sensibility injected into our 21st century present. Robert’s wardrobe particularly. Plemons snatched Best Actor at Cannes for his work across all three chapters, and deservedly so, but everyone’s on fire here, particularly chameleonic supporting players Hong Chau and Margaret Qualley.
It’s as though Lanthimos himself has inspired a comparable level of devotion in his growing stable of actors and through their work they seek to please him. Is Lanthimos the Godhead here? Revered by critics and bloggers (yes, hi), given license to do as he likes, good taste be damned? Are we the supplicants to his oversized largess?
It’s possible. But this is bravura, creative filmmaking. The kind of thing its thrilling to see in a cinema with a cross-section of people – some prepared, some less-so – for the experience of that diverse set of gasps and laughs. It may be a theatre of provocation, but isn’t that better than the doldrums of disinterest so often available at our multiplexes?
Kinds of Kindness is like a box of chocolates (to come dangerously close to paraphrasing Forrest Gump)… only half of them are filled with razorblades. Dig in.
The Lost Highway Hotel 