Don't Look Up (2021)
(I'm taking a two-week hiatus. Enjoy the holidays! I'll see you again on 01/09/22.)
(Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence are worried astronomers in Don’t Look Up)
Don’t Look Up (2021)
By now it’s become a cliché to say that moviemakers who bombard us with crude effects mistake blatancy for power. Adam McKay, the writer-director of Don't Look Up, mistakes blatancy for insight, antics for revelation. (David Sirota co-wrote the script.)
In this spoof – the word “satire” does this elongated SNL skit too much honor – McKay sets out to show how our politics is unprepared to meet the crisis of global warming. To that end, he’s concocted a fable about a 10-kilometer comet speeding directly toward Earth, due to collide with the planet in six months, ensuring our destruction.
When two dedicated but socially awkward Michigan State astronomers, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), spot the enormous rock hurtling toward us, they feel honor bound to scurry to the White House and convince President Janie Orlean (Meryl Streep) that world annihilation is incoming.
But she counters with delay, prioritizing the coming midterms and weighing her eventual re-election odds. Yes, scientific facts deserve a mention, but these dire alarms the scientists want to sound surely can be dialed back.
If this brings to mind COVID-deniers, anti-vaxxers and blind fealty to Trump’s witlessness, McKay is counting on your uneasiness to do the work his writing won’t. His doomsday scenario also calls to mind Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964), a hilarious yet chilling “prediction” of mutually assured destruction (MAD) if the U.S. and Russia stumbled into nuclear war.
In that movie, too, calamity was certain, but the world’s unwillingness to confront inarguable facts remained Kubrick’s bright, clear satirical target all the way through. He never lost sight of it in his tale’s brisk 95 minutes.
Global warming, unlike imminent nuclear war, is a gradual phenomenon, severe as its consequences will be, and it’s not as fixed or unstoppable as a physical object hurtling through space. Yet McKay uses this absurd comparison – and 158 minutes – to assault our nerves, logic be damned.
A less than fully alarmed President Orlean tries to turn the calamity to her political advantage, partnering with eccentric tech billionaire Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), who persuades her that the giant speeding rock is made up of rich, profitable minerals that can be mined if the object can be blown to manageable bits. Eyes gleaming with greed, he assures the president that his scheme to do exactly that will work.
(Meryl Streep is cagey U.S. President Janie Orlean in Don’t Look Up)
Looking on at this preposterous evasion of the facts, Mindy and Kate want only to bring the country to its senses and give truth a chance. So they take to the airwaves, and Mindy falls into the clutches of an unprincipled morning TV news anchor, Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett). She treats the impending calamity about as seriously as she would a weekend rainstorm, but is willing to frighten her audience to keep them tuning in, and, on the side (why the hell not?), to get Mindy into bed.
Meanwhile, with the astronomers urging the public to “look up” as the comet becomes visible in its approach to Earth, a “don't look up” movement rises to deny doom is headed our way (these demonstrators wear Trumpian red baseball caps).
Thus, argues McKay, corrupt politics and jaded media give truth the boot, as both enlightened and ignorant factions work to sway a hopelessly baffled public.
But what can be done about this truth-vs.-lies standoff? No answer is even hinted at in McKay’s frantic skewering. By the time Mindy, on Brie’s show, erupts into a Howard Beale-like meltdown (invoking 1976’s Network), all McKay gives him to declare is profanity-laced righteousness, and all DiCaprio does is scream ’til he’s red-faced.
Unsurprisingly, Mindy’s on-air tirade changes nothing, so he and Kate, reduced to simply hoping for the best, retreat to his calm Michigan home and patient, forgiving wife June (Melanie Lynskey). On the way they pick up a drifting skateboarder, Yule (Timothée Chalamet), who spouts hang-loose, just-be-yourself bromides (though, a child of evangelists, Yule offers a prayer before a communal meal that feels surprisingly genuine).
The blunt performances bludgeon, but rarely ring with powerful conviction. DiCaprio’s bewildered academic is outwitted at every turn. He musters no convincing opposition to the political and business opportunists Orlean and Isherwell. He just yells about how wrong they are. And the vulpine TV host Brie never gets her comeuppance. Blanchett does a smooth imitation of Megyn Kelly, but Brie’s journalistic shallowness is never frontally attacked.
McKay mocks Fox News, but never gets near the Murdochian wiliness that props it up (which is a surprising oversight, since TV’s “Succession”, where McKay is an executive producer, relentlessly dissects a Murdoch-like family’s cynical hold on media power) .
McKay thinks that getting angry is not just one step toward becoming informed, but ought to be potent enough in itself to move the world. If only we’ll grow angry enough, he seems to be saying, enlightenment and corrective action will follow. If that were true, in recent years certain individuals would never have taken up residence in the White House, a certain “news” network wouldn’t have filled millions of minds with patent lies, and certain “patriots” wouldn’t have stormed the Capitol. Rage can expose or cloud the truth, generate light or heat.
But McKay seems to have no idea how to confront such conundrums head on. Satire only works if you pointedly dismantle, and hopefully take down, the dishonesty you’re satirizing. McKay is fascinated by our current malaise, but doesn’t offer a single clue, comedic or otherwise, about how to get us out of it.