Ouch.
This is about as scathing an indictment of modern American behavior as can be imagined.
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| Hoping to share their dire and tremendously important discovery on national television, Randall (Leonardo DiCaprio, center right) and Kate (Jennifer Lawrence, far right) little realize they're about to be trivialized by hosts Brie (Cate Blanchett) and Jack (Tyler Perry). |
This time, McKay and co-scripter David Sirota set their sights much higher: the cognitive dissonance and blind stupidity that prompt so many Americans to deny the existence of climate change, safe covid vaccines, the results of the 2020 election, and a great deal more.
Willful ignorance runs rampant these days, which gives McKay and Sirota plenty to scream about. While quite a few of this film’s sarcastic bombs hit their target, Don’t Look Up isn’t as artistically tight as The Big Short, and I also miss that earlier film’s inventively cheeky directorial flourishes. Sarcasm and snark once again are in abundance, but McKay’s approach here is more dramatically conventional.
Perhaps that’s because the operative metaphor — and its real-world counterpart — are too sobering, too horrifying, for gleeful frivolity.
The Big Short was fun, whereas this one is deeply unsettling: mad-as-hell, take-no-prisoners storytelling.
Events kick off quietly, as university astronomy professor Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a new comet orbiting our solar system. Their initial excitement dwindles when Kate and a gaggle of fellow grad students watch Randall compute the comet’s trajectory on a white board, to determine whether it’ll be visible when it passes Earth.
The film’s most grimly impactful wallop occurs right here, as Randall — fully absorbed by complex mathematical equations — initially fails to register the implication of the zero he has just written on the board. DiCaprio sells this moment: Randall hesitates, starts to shake his head, knows he hasn’t made a mistake … but nonetheless erases the zero and empties the room. Except for Kate.
Computing the dimensions of the comet is similarly easy. It’s the size of Mount Everest … and if — when — it strikes Earth, in just over six months, it’ll be a planetary extinction event.
Well.
What does one do, with information like that?
One contacts Those In Charge, of course, in the hope that collaborative great minds can work the problem, and arrive at a solution. The obvious best effort: Divert the damn thing somehow, just enough to miss Earth.
Alas, Kate, Randall and NASA Planetary Defense Coordination head Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) immediately find themselves mired in the quicksand of administrative self-interest, political expediency and our social media addiction to rubbish such as brainless pop stars breaking up with their lovers.
Bread and circuses, folks. And goodness, but our heads have been in the sand lately.
(In one of this film’s rare break-the-fourth-wall moments, text pops up to assure us that the Planetary Defense Coordination Office is, indeed, a real thing.)
This story’s comet is — of course — a stand-in for climate change, and our world’s refusal to treat that threat seriously.
First among villains is Meryl Streep’s U.S. President Orlean, a right-wing hawk motivated solely by her approval ratings. She’s an obvious riff on the recently departed President Trump; while it’s fun to watch Streep chew up the scenery with such waspish contempt, her character is the least successful.
She’s too much of a burlesque. Orlean can’t be bothered with “science stuff,” when she’s focused on getting her secret lover — a reactionary sheriff in the Joe Arpaio mold — appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court (!).
Jonah Hill also fails to connect as Orlean’s dim-bulb son, Jason, who — in a bold act of nepotism — is her Chief of Staff. Hill too broadly tries to be outrageous, as opposed to simply being outrageous.
Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry are far more successful as Brie Evantee and Jack Bremmer, the vapid co-hosts of The Daily Rip, the sort of happy-dappy chat show that trivializes everything with New Age-y platitudes and faux emotion. Their banter is enough to drive one insane, and it scores because they’re so familiar: Today’s television is laden with similar boobs.
Blanchett is a total hoot, particularly when the sexually aggressive Brie sets her sights on the very married Randall. Melanie Lynskey is just right as his caring wife, June; like Randall, Kate and Olgethorpe, she’s one of this story’s key “straight” characters.
The best and funniest work comes from Mark Rylance, as Peter Isherwell: a quietly arrogant, touchy-feely tech wizard who combines the worst aspects of Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, and who refuses to make eye contact with anybody. Isherwell’s newest smart phone, just being released, is able to sense and address a user’s feelings.
Isherwell’s every sentence, delivered with bland sincerity by Rylance, is a masterpiece of meaningless technobabble. He’s both hilarious and terrifying.
Morgan’s Oglethorpe is a bit harder to read. On the one hand, he’s as anxious as Randall and Kate, to emphasize the severity of what faces the world; at times, though, he wanders afield with bizarre non sequiturs that make him sound disconnected from reality. That’s an odd personality quirk for somebody who’s one of the “good guys.”
Lawrence’s Kate has the cut-the-BS bluntness of youth; unlike anybody else — at least, initially — she gives free rein to mounting apoplexy, in the face of Orlean’s refusal to do something. But that’s another trap, of course, because social media can transform a moment of genuine passion into a meme designed to humiliate … and, just that quickly, one’s credibility is shot.
Lawrence nonetheless gets one of the most telling lines, however, when Kate — refuting the suggestion that Orlean and her ilk are deliberately conspiring against the American people — observes, “They’re not smart enough to be as evil as you’re giving them credit for.”
And boy, that sure hits home.
DiCaprio’s Randall has the most intriguing character arc. He’s introduced as a mousy academic who’s terrified of speaking truth to power … or, indeed, any sort of public speaking. DiCaprio fumbles, fusses and frum-frahs so persuasively, that we can’t help feeling sorry for the guy.
But Randall soon is transformed — by a combination of Brie’s interest, and his rising fame as a “sexy social media astronomer” — into a polished, self-assured Voice Of Reason. Trouble is, Randall continues to believe that he’s doing good by remaining on the inside, close to Orlean and her staff, and little realizes that he’s being played.
Timothée Chalamet pops up in the third act as Yule, a disaffected young man with an unexpectedly sweet side, which makes him totally endearing.
By this point, things have turned quite ugly. Commerce and compromise have overruled common sense, and half the country has decided that the whole thing is a hoax. (Sound familiar?) Orlean fans those flames, even after the comet becomes visible, by insisting that people will have nothing to worry about, if they simply keep their eyes glued to the ground.
This becomes a rabble-rousing slogan, in the best MAGA style: Just “Don’t look up!”
The tech credits are excellent, and visual effects supervisor Raymond Gieringer’s team does a fabulous job with the comet.
McKay and Sirota don’t pull any punches, and — even though this film is self-indulgently overlong, at 138 minutes — it’s hard not to be sickened by this scorching reminder of what’s wrong with things today.
Sadly, though, Don’t Look Up likely will play solely to the choir; I rather doubt climate change deniers, anti-vaxxers and all manner of other yahoos will take an interest or — if they do — see themselves in this excoriating parable.
More’s the pity.
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