The Strangeness of Kindness
KINDS OF KINDNESS (YORGOS LANTHIMOS) 2024
🤷🤷🤷 and a half
Everybody’s looking for something…
Kinds of Kindness is a movie with a Plum Crazy Purple Dodge Challenger in it. I think we can all agree on that. It’s questionable if we’ll agree on anything else. Not so much challenging as confounding, Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest sprawling, yet personal, movie of three stories seemingly linked only by the actors, might be a brilliantly abstract realisation of the nature of coercive control, or an ink-black absurdist comedy.
Or both. Or neither. Or a million different other things.
For some, its glacial pacing and almost 3 hour runtime will feel indulgent, particularly given how stripped back this feels artistically when compared to The Favourite and, in particular, Poor Things. There’s certainly no sense that this movie will cross over into the mainstream. Nor should we expect it to. It’s clear that Lanthimos is eager to tell the stories he wants to tell. Or maybe that should be <is eager to introduce the characters he wants to introduce>. This is, above all, a movie driven by the characters and their motivations; their fears; their insecurities. Yet each also has to navigate a life steered by pervasive outside influence, where any sense of control seems fleeting yet essential.
It’s perhaps unfair to describe this as Robert Altman by way of David Lynch, not least because Altman would more clearly connect the tales here, and Lynch is a true visionary. But it’s worth referencing Lynch because there’s a feel of this having the potential to be an outstanding movie for its first two thirds before tipping over the edge with such an abrupt break from reality in the final act that much of the impressive earlier work becomes lost by the end. This, for me, perfectly encapsulates how I feel about Mulholland Drive. To be clear, Kinds of Kindness is not in the same rarefied air as Lynch’s movie which, for the first two acts, is quite possibly the greatest film ever made, so that at least makes the dropoff here less painful by comparison. There are other parallels with Lynch though, through not only the surrealist elements but also in revealing the strangeness and darkness that lurks unseen in people’s lives and hearts behind closed doors.
What is missing from the three tales here is, for the most part, the how and the why, though the middle tale offers more of each. We are dropped in on lives that feel entirely strange yet that strangeness is ingrained in the mundanity of the everyday. Again, the middle tale feels more of an outlier. In our first story, we see Jesse Plemons’ life entirely controlled by Willem Dafoe as both a benefactor and a manipulator, with rewards for increasingly dangerous acts. In the second tale, Emma Stone plays a wife lost on a scientific expedition, who when returned from her ordeal, seems to be an imposter to her husband (Plemons again) and must seek to prove herself. This, in itself, is not an original theme, though its execution is. Finally, we have the tale of cult members Stone and Plemons searching for a mythical healer predicted by their guru Dafoe, a cause that has led them to abandon their normal lives, though it is revealed that Stone’s normal life away from the cult is anything but. Certainly there are some parallels between the first and last stories in a literal sense.
It’s important here not to reveal too much detail. The movie is clearly intended as a journey of discovery for the viewer. Depending on your viewpoint, this is delightfully black and quirky, willingly stretching our expectations and launching them in odd, caustic and destructive directions by exaggerating the dysfunction of modern society; or it’s an uncomfortable reveal of a world that is above all harsh and cruel, where kindness is laced with irony, offering us little escape but to laugh at the macabre. I don’t actually believe it’s that simple. I don’t think Lanthimos does either. But it’s hard to know if he’s being bitingly playful largely for its own sake or there is something deeper there. Your mileage may vary, as they say. For me, it becomes more coherent if I take the obvious theme relating to controlling influence and power, and this seems to be supported throughout all three tales, including the last where the theme of the abuse of that power becomes unsettling and perhaps even unnecessary, as sexual violence against a woman rears its head. Is this really any more extreme than the elements of literal and figurative self-harm that also exist in this space he’s created? For me, yes. Sexual exploitation of women on film, while not entirely taboo, must be justified in serving a clear purpose. With the ambiguity of intent on display here it’s not easy to satisfy myself that this criterion has been met.
What is tremendous here is some of the acting, particularly from Jesse Plemons who’s become a kind of indie/arthouse Matt Damon. He’s the principal focus of stories one and two and delivers brilliantly in each, occupying the exact range the director needs to make this work. Though his performance in story two offers a significantly darker edge, his nimbleness in providing a certain pathetic resilience alongside desperation in story one is no less impressive. It’s hard to argue against his performances being the glue that holds this together for the most part, even if Emma Stone takes over in the final act. Elsewhere, there’s fine character work, particularly from Dafoe in our first story, though he’s offered only a fairly straight take on cult leader in the script for the final story (though his hair looks exceptional in one scene), which lacks the invention of the preceding stories. Incidental players drift in and out, with Mamoudou Athie being particularly watchable in story two, which contains the movie’s funniest moment even if you can see the set up coming a mile off.
As is now the norm with Lanthimos, dialogue is delivered in that odd, flat, emotionally disconnected way, often with off-centre framing of the characters, which makes us focus on each word. Here it adds to the strangeness of the scenarios at play and the people caught up in them. Certainly, stylistically there is coherence here - it’s not a scattergun approach to storytelling even if divining a singular purpose for the movie proves elusive. As a whole, it’s far too accomplished a piece of film-making to consider experimental, though there are elements where you feel Lanthimos and frequent screenwriting partner Efthimis Filippou are still exploring rather than being settled on a direction. Visually though, it’s one of the least interesting movies from Lanthimos to date, but that feels deliberate. As with much of the film, different elements will please and anger in equal measure, though I have to single out his tease of the Eurythmics’ Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) needledrop which he never gives us the chance to enjoy for the latter. Perhaps playing it straight was too obvious. Its lyrical relevance at least is clear.
Yorgos Lanthimos is a director who doesn’t always make it easy. When he gets it right, I adore his work. At other times, I can appreciate the craft but feel left cold. I have no problem with that as a rule, but it can make it hard to rate his movies that don’t fall into my sweet spot. He’s not dissimilar to Nicolas Winding Refn in that respect. The rating for Kinds of Kindness could, quite legitimately, fall anywhere between two and four-and-a-half stars. Some people will love it, some may loathe it. But it’s not unreasonable to consider Lanthimos an important voice in cinema who should continue to be given the opportunity to further explore the language of film-making because, from that, brilliance can emerge as he has shown. For me, it doesn’t quite come together here but there are moments which will doubtless inform his later work and see him grow as a writer/director. I wonder too, if repeat viewings, may reveal more secrets.
The question for the viewer is whether the movie justifies a repeat viewing.
