“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” So goes the famous quote by Maya Angelou. But what if someone has nothing to show? What if they can only tell you who they are, represent themselves to you through their own perspective on themselves? Sam Levinson’s Malcolm & Marie teaches us, callously using its Black leads as mouthpieces for its inane bitching and ill-informed philosophizing, that anyone taking up the guts of two hours of your day to tell you who they are is, in fact, showing you their sadness, their self-obsession and potentially also their hypocrisy. In this case, Maya Angelou is right: believe Sam, even if he doesn’t quite believe himself.
The principal failing of Malcolm & Marie is a quality baked into its concept: its self-reflexivity. The titular characters are a young film director (John David Washington) and his younger partner, a former aspiring actor (Zendaya). The film takes place almost in real time upon their return home from the premiere of his latest film, which is partially based on her life. It has been received enthusiastically by the premiere’s attendees, including major American film critics, some of whom haven’t been so warm toward Malcolm’s previous work. His own enthusiasm, however, isn’t matched by Marie’s – she’s understandably peeved by his appropriation of her troubled life story for his art, further peeved by his reluctance to admit to this appropriation and, finally, set off by his omission of her in his speech following the premiere. So begins a solid hour-and-a-half of bickering followed by making up followed by more bickering followed by more making up etc. all interspersed with florid, verbose monologues which, combined with the film’s single location, contribute to an artificial, theatrical atmosphere that utterly saps it of the immediacy it requires.
That Levinson is, himself, a young film director with a history of disagreements with film critics over his work isn’t just notable – it’s literally the point of much of this film. Malcolm & Marie is Levinson’s retort to those who dared dislike his previous artistic output and further dared to air their dislike in public. In the diegesis of this film, art is fundamentally legitimate and criticism of it is fundamentally ignorant. Malcolm is not a great artist because he is provably great at creating art but because Levinson has deemed him so; his perspective is here as it is toward his own art and this film is his statement on that art, this film included. He pre-empts any criticism by clumsily, foolishly attempting to delegitimize it.
Then, lest anyone accuse him of delusions of grandeur, he litters his film with some of the most tone-deaf self-reflexion conceivable. When his script reads “Am I sexualizing you?” while his camera literally sexualizes his female lead, it’s not clever, it’s just hypocritical and Levinson has nothing to say about this self-conscious hypocrisy. Self-awareness isn’t an excuse for poor or simplistic filmmaking, just as it isn’t smart or cool – it’s just dull and extremely unoriginal. That Levinson then encourages “staying in your lane” whilst doing anything but – exploring racial issues he has neither the standing nor the awareness to examine properly and responsibly – and brazenly flaunts this contradiction, it’s presented as though it’s some kind of incisive comment, though on what remains a mystery. It’s an insight only into his self-obsession.
Levinson certainly has a lot to say. He just doesn’t have anything meaningful to say. Being educated in filmmaking technique, being objectively intelligent, being a liberal abuser of the thesaurus – none of these give a person any particular understanding about the kind of issues that drive intimate character studies like this, nor, apparently, any understanding about how to write believable dialogue. Levinson has his characters talk and talk and talk without ever actually communicating anything substantial or original.
Perhaps this is why he’s chosen to mask his fatuous whining about how the world treats its terribly underappreciated beneficiaries of nepotism behind a transparent cloak of racial commentary. Besides sporadically outlining the odd reductive comprehension of critical race theory, Levinson has evidently only a most basic appreciation of such issues. Furthermore, if his compassion for African-Americans’ struggle for equality in American society is genuine, his crass, self-serving adoption of this struggle as a thematic and narrative point in a film made so he can complain about a bad review he once got is so ignorant a move it not only negates any of Malcolm & Marie’s supportive political utterances, it outweighs them. Framing all criticism of Malcolm’s work as racist, thereby drawing similarity between racism toward Malcolm and lack of appreciation toward Levinson’s work, is an extremely cavalier method of deploying racial issues. It’s not just dismissive, it’s outright offensive, though it’s rivalled in its offensiveness by the simple fact anyone made Black actors wade through such turgid dialogue.
This film is so improbably full of wretched writing it ought to soon acquire cult status for that detail alone, a status it’ll surely never earn by legitimate means. There’s an art to writing the kind of ineloquent, spontaneous dialogue people use in real life without making it sound trite and overly pithy; Levinson combines his mishandling of that art with the urge to show off, to make his characters as literate as his evident access to a dictionary permits him to be. Nobody speaks like Malcolm and Marie do in this film. (Nobody writes like the film’s fictional critic does either, tellingly.) They’ve always got something to say about everything and it’s always perfectly eloquent, though rarely impressively so. When one berates the other with “You’re psychotic,” the other responds with “You’re hyperbolic.” When Marie provides Malcolm with an example of the kind of speech she’d have liked him to give about her earlier in the night, it includes lines like “Thank you for the mistakes you’ve made.” And the whole thing is laughably crammed with “fucks” to the point that it feels Levinson will hardly let a single sentence go by without at least one shoehorned in.
It’s all in service of a certain “style,” something which Malcolm & Marie ostensibly boasts in spades. Yet it’s a forced style, a sense of idealized cool in its funk soundtrack and monochrome cinematography – it’s never style that bears any apparent relevance to what Levinson is trying to say, if he’s trying to say anything at all beyond “Boo hoo, someone didn’t love my movie!” When he actually does try something stylistically, it’s consistently badly done. Changes in mood occur escalate suddenly out of nowhere; opening credits are bizarrely then repeated for the closing credits; a very PG love montage with disconnected voiceover is a low point, coming across like a rejected ‘00s commercial for Dolce & Gabbana perfume.
Unfortunately for its stars, who quarantined with a small crew mid-pandemic to make the film, Malcolm & Marie affords them only the promise of richly developed roles and ample screen time to explore them, never the fulfilment of it. Washington is mealy-mouthed and blunt as Malcolm, garbling his way through some heinous monologues to no avail; Zendaya is shallow and too nakedly earnest for the role, quite incapable of translating its high camp dialogue into anything even remotely compelling (her repeated use of “Mac and cheese” is especially odd). She’s playing Levinson’s idea of the perfect saviour figure: virtuous, opinionated, perceptive, educated, witty, attractive and wholly willing to shoulder the burden of not only living with her own tragic backstory but living also with her tediously troubled boyfriend’s refusal to move past his own, comparatively minuscule personal tragedies. What a tragedy that two talented actors were so shown up like this, saddled with a white man’s impression of the Black man’s struggle, forced to realize the artistic representation of their director’s seemingly limitless levels of hubris. Levinson’s self-importance has not only left a stain on his already questionable track record, it’s left a stain on both Washington’s and Zendaya’s.
The post Malcolm & Marie appeared first on Spectrum Culture.