Disney / Buena Vista
Kinds of Kindness is an anthology of moods.
Director Yorgos Lanthimos calls it “an absurdist anthology” but this is as misleading as it is descriptive: Kinds of Kindness is a demolition derby where form and content are constantly trying to force one another into the wall.
Often the interest of a scene is the juxtaposition of sheer banality of the action being depicted with the depth of intrigue being communicated by the photography and music.
It is a space where the viewer is invited to find meaning and simultaneously reminded that the filmmakers think that withholding and undercutting meaning is the meaning in and of itself.
The film features three stories which are often described as “loosely connected,” but this designation does not really convey their relationship.
They all feature a repertory of players (Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Emma Stone, Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau) and contain (but do not feature) a single character, R.M.F (Yorgos Lanthimos), who seems to be invested with incredible meaning by everyone in those stories but who seems only notable to us by virtue of his dress shirt.
That’s not a critique, by the way, the two framing segments of the picture, concern R.M.F.’s shirt being described over the phone and it being dribbled upon with ketchup at a diner, which should clue you in very quickly to the tone the film is trying to achieve.
The first story, and the one that has drawn the most attention, stars Jesse Plemons as Robert– a middle aged married man who is completely dominated by his lover, Raymond (Willem Dafoe). Raymond’s control over Robert extends almost to the point of magical realism: he knows what kind of fruit juice Robert drinks in the morning and at what time.
When Raymond asks Robert to kill R.M.F. in a staged car crash, and Robert fails to inflict serious injury he demands Robert try again and when Robert refuses, he destroys his life overnight. Robert is seemingly able to navigate the almost metaphysical catastrophe of Raymond’s rebuff until he meets Rita (Emma Stone) who is also being tasked by Robert to kill R.M.F. and he’s forced into action.
The second story recasts Plemons as Daniel, a policeman, who begins to lose his mind after his wife Liz (Emma Stone) is rescued from an apparent death at sea (by R.M.F. naturally).
At first, he’s overjoyed at the return of his wife but gradually becomes convinced that his wife has fundamentally been changed by the experience before finally being drawn fully into her dream world of domination and self mutilation. In this story the filmmaking becomes less conventional than the first (a feat in and of itself) as the film gets increasingly less tethered to realism and is more willing to dive into the disturbing inner world of the characters– one gets the feeling in this story that the director is trying to replicate the feeling of slowly losing oneself to a psychotic episode.
The final story involves a sex cult run by Dafoe and Hong Chau who are trying to raise R.M.F. from the dead by having Plemons and Stone locate a woman from Stone’s dreams who can reportedly reanimate the dead.
Hunter Schafer makes a great cameo here, one of the few strong moments that’s not delivered by one of the repertory players of the film, and Stone and Plemons’ performances really branch out and you get a sense of the depth of challenge they must have had working on this film and making each set of bizarre, internal, choices work as a cohesive whole.
After reading all that, one can be forgiven for asking: “What does it all mean?”
Yorgos Lanthimos is playing with formal concerns he has consistently enjoyed in his career: repetition, leitmotif, the camera as impartial observer to madness, the juxtaposition of static and active camerawork to seduce the viewer into the world of the character.
Part of the point of this film is that it rejects a lot of traditional narrative techniques for the creation of meaning in favor of suggestion and juxtaposition: the very act of recasting the same actors into variations of the same archetypes suggests a kind of dream logic we’re supposed to fall into, a surreal exaggeration we can read at our leisure.
The narrative concerns of the film, such as they are, seem to me to focus on the intense storehouse of meaning we place on sexual release and how easily desire can intertwine with the death drive found in Freud. The search for release, coupled with the search for understanding, mutates into a need for all meaning to be conferred upon the object of affection, which the characters justify ultimately by their willingness to destroy and be destroyed.
It is a difficult watch, but never boring.
One element of the film that I haven’t been able to convey in this review is its wonderful sense of verbal irony and the recurrence of phrases with almost the rhythm of running gags. This has been a very formal review , but the film is not at all without wit.
Extras include a featurette and deleted scenes.How much you’ll enjoy this film is dependent on how willing you are to undertake the journey and accept the absence of definitive answers. It is not representational art, as most films are, more like an ink blot in which you’ll read your own experiences into and either be drawn into or repulsed from.
For my part, I found it fascinating.
Recommended.
You must be logged in to post a comment Login