For his latest effort, Quebecois writer-director Denys Arcand employs the tried-and-true strategy of basing his film on the premise of another recent hit movie. It’s a classic strategy to get funding, akin to Peckinpah saying that The Magnificent Seven was Seven Samurai in the US West. But Arcand does not meet with success. The Fall of the American Empire grabs so many references that the opening 20 minutes feels like a Bingo card of recent Hollywood history, a jumble of borrowed elements that devolves into a vacuous thriller without thrills.
The Fall of the American Empire features sharp echoes of no less than three recent films. We meet protagonist Pierre-Paul (Alexandre Landry), a self-enamored genius, as he’s obliterating his relationship with a girlfriend he doesn’t deserve; this is how The Social Network opened.
He works as a courier, an intellectual trapped in a work-a-day job because of the economy, sort of like Good Will Hunting but not quite as repressed. Soon, the hapless genius accidentally stumbles upon massive bags of cash in the wake of a gangland shoot-out. Of course he grabs the money, and both the police and surviving gang members pursue him, much like Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men.
That just has to be a great film, right? Not really. The Fall of the American Empire fails simply because Arcand spends so much time telling and so little time showing. For instance, it tells us that Pierre-Paul is smart—he constantly tells us about his PhD in Philosophy and quotes the ancient Greeks. But he never demonstrates even above-average intelligence, instead blundering into terrible, idiotic decisions. He somehow avoids being arrested or murdered because of his partnership with the other two main characters in the film, a motorcycle gang leader and a call girl.
Arcand doesn’t trust his audience at all, yelling his message at you again and again, loaded with exposition and nearly bereft of drama. His blunt argument is that late capitalism is a rigged system where the privileged manipulate the law to ensure an ever-widening wealth gap; this point is made in the film’s very title, through every scene and even into press materials and early reviews. Read as an allegory, the real gangsters would be the millionaires and not the guys Pierre-Paul robbed. But despite its metaphorical title, The Fall of the American Empire is too overt for such interpretation, screaming at the audience like The Big Short without a sense of humor. Arcand resembles a certain superlative-addicted US President in his wanton disregard for viewers’ ability to comprehend even moderately complex ideas. Let’s hope that the rest of popular culture does not follow his lead.
Yet Fall is not entirely terrible. Even though it features gangsters torturing a black man for information by hanging him from a rope, makes no use of the beauty of Montreal for its cinematography and has supporting characters who are cardboard-cutout caricatures of believable people, it does include a breakout role for Maripier Morin, a non-actress who plays a call girl with such invigorating deftness as to make the film almost enjoyable. But aside from her performance, there’s nowhere to fall but up.
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